Ronald Coase is 100 years old today. The Economist's Schumpeter recently offered an appreciation of Coase's vast importance for those of us who study law from an economic perspective:
The economics profession was slow to recognise Ronald Coase’s genius. He first expounded his thinking about the firm in a lecture in Dundee in 1932, when he was just 21 years old. Nobody much listened. He published “The Nature of the Firm” five years later. It went largely unread.
But Mr Coase laboured on regardless: a second seminal article on “The Problem of Social Cost” laid the intellectual foundations of the deregulation revolution of the 1980s. Eventually, Mr Coase acquired an army of followers, such as Oliver Williamson, who fleshed out his ideas. In 1991, aged 80, he was awarded a Nobel prize. Far from resting on his laurels, Mr Coase will publish a new book in 2011, with Ning Wang of Arizona State University, on “How China Became Capitalist”.
Schumpeter goes on to concisely summarize Coase's contribution to the economic analysis of corporate governance. It's a good read. For even better reads (IMHO, of course), however, check out my posts:
Ronald Coase, The Firm, the Market, and the Law
and
Ronald Coase Does Not Explain Howard Dean
