Law & Economics
Portrait of Ronald Coase
Scholar portraitSource: Wikimedia Commons

Coase

Ronald H. Coase

Economist and institutional theorist

transaction costsproperty rightsinstitutional economics

Official Source Note

The University of Chicago Law School describes Coase as a founding scholar in law and economics whose work helped create the field and earned the 1991 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics. The page emphasizes his long association with Chicago and his role in transaction-cost economics.

Coase is placed first in the intellectual history of the site because The Nature of the Firm and The Problem of Social Cost made firms, bargaining, transaction costs, and institutional alternatives central to legal analysis.

Source: University of Chicago Law School

Relevance to the Archive

For corporate and financial law, Coase helps explain why firms, markets, contracts, and legal rules are alternative governance mechanisms rather than isolated categories.

Representative Contributions

  • The Nature of the Firm (1937)
  • The Problem of Social Cost (1960)

Works Included Here