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Ronald Coase

File:Coase_scan_11_edited_(cropped).jpg · Wikimedia Commons · See Wikimedia Commons

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Ronald Coase

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Also known as Ronald Harry Coase, R. H. Coase, Ronald H. Coase

British economist and Nobel laureate (1910–2013)

OverviewAI-generated

Ronald Harry Coase (1910–2013) was a British economist, historian, writer, and university teacher. Born in Willesden, he held citizenship in the United Kingdom and the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland. His academic career included positions at the University of Chicago, University at Buffalo, University of Virginia, and University of Dundee. He was educated at the London School of Economics and Political Science, the University of Virginia, and the University of London.

Coase’s work focused on economics, economic theory, and law and economics. He received the Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel. He was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the Mont Pelerin Society. His doctoral student was David D. Friedman. Notable works include *The nature of the firm*, *How China Became Capitalist*, *Chinas Kapitalismus*, and *L'entreprise, le marché et le droit*. He died in Chicago and was buried in Graceland Cemetery.

Synthesized by Vinony from 37 facts across 8 sources: Wikidata, Crossref, Open Library, MusicBrainz, Last.fm, Nobel Prize, Vinony collections, Vinony graph. Generated from structured data (not the Wikipedia text) and checked against those facts — may still contain errors.

Person · Open Library

Works
4

Top works

  • Chinas Kapitalismus
  • L'entreprise, le marché et le droit
  • How China Became Capitalist
  • The nature of the firm

via Open Library + Wikidata

Music · MusicBrainz

Type
Person
Gender
Male
Origin
King's Lynn
Active from
2002-07-30
Official site

via MusicBrainz · CC0

Listeners · Last.fm

Listeners
5
Total plays
7

<a href="https://www.last.fm/music/Ronald+Coase">Read more on Last.fm</a>

via Last.fm · Ronald Coase

Recent publications · Crossref

5 total works indexed

  1. Learning representations by back-propagating errors

    · 1986 · cited 24,386x

  2. Initial sequencing and analysis of the human genome

    · 2001 · cited 18,617x

  3. The american rheumatism association 1987 revised criteria for the classification of rheumatoid arthritis

    · 1988 · cited 15,809x

  4. Lifetime Prevalence and Age-of-Onset Distributions of DSM-IV Disorders in the National Comorbidity Survey Replication

    · 2005 · cited 15,587x

  5. The Nature of the Firm

    · 1937 · cited 14,319x

via Crossref · CC0

Quotes

  • “The traditional approach has tended to obscure the nature of the choice that has to be made. The question is commonly thought of as one in which A inflicts harm on B and what has to be decided is: how should we restrain A? But this is wrong. We are dealing with a problem of a reciprocal nature. To avoid the harm to B would inflict harm on A. The real question that has to be decided is: should A be allowed to harm B or should B be allowed to harm A?”
  • “In my view, what is wanted in industrial organization is a direct approach to the problem. This would concentrate on what activities firms undertake, and would endeavor to discover the characteristics of the groupings of activities within firms. Which activities tend to be associated and which do not? The answer may well differ for different kinds of firm.”
  • “American institutionalists were not theoretical but anti-theoretical.... Without a theory they had nothing to pass on except a mass of descriptive material waiting for a theory, or a fire.”
  • “Transaction costs were used in the one case to show that if they are not included in the analysis, the firm has no purpose, while in the other I showed, as I thought, that if transaction costs were not introduced into the analysis, for the range of problems considered, the law had no purpose.”
  • “In my youth it was said that what was too silly to be said may be sung. In modern economics it may be put into mathematics.”
  • “I can't remember [of a good regulation]. Regulation of transport, regulation of agriculture—agriculture is a, zoning is z. You know, you go from a to z, they are all bad. There were so many studies, and the result was quite universal: The effects were bad.”

via Wikiquote · CC BY-SA

Nobel Prize

  • The Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel1991

    “for his discovery and clarification of the significance of transaction costs and property rights for the institutional structure and functioning of the economy”

NobelPrize.org →

~24 min read

Encyclopedic overview

Ronald Harry Coase (/koʊs/; 29 December 1910 – 2 September 2013) was a British economist and author. Coase was educated at the London School of Economics, where he was a member of the faculty until 1951. He was the Clifton R. Musser Professor of Economics at the University of Chicago Law School, where he arrived in 1964 and remained for the rest of his life. He received the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 1991.

Coase believed economists should study real-world wealth creation, in the manner of Adam Smith, stating, "It is suicidal for the field to slide into a hard science of choice, ignoring the influences of society, history, culture, and politics on the working of the economy." He believed economic study should reduce emphasis on price theory or theoretical markets and instead focus on real markets. He established the case for the corporation as a means to pay the costs of operating a marketplace. Coase is best known for two articles: "The Nature of the Firm" (1937), which introduces the concept of transaction costs to explain the nature and limits of firms; and "The Problem of Social Cost" (1960), which suggests that well-defined property rights could overcome the problems of externalities if it were not for transaction costs (see Coase theorem). Additionally, Coase's transaction costs approach has been influential in modern organizational economics, where it was re-introduced by Oliver E. Williamson.

Excerpted from Wikipedia’s “Ronald Coase” article, available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.

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