Ronald Coase

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Ronald Coase

Ronald Harry Coase (born December 29, 1910 in Willesden near London , England , † September 2, 2013 in Chicago , Illinois ) was a British economist . In 1991 he received the Alfred Nobel Memorial Prize for Economics for “his discovery and clarification of the significance of so-called transaction costs and the rights of disposal for the institutional structure and the functioning of the economy”, the so-called Coase theorem .

Life

Ronald Coase grew up in England and studied at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) from 1929 to 1931 . His academic career began in Dundee and Liverpool , but soon returned to the LSE. In 1951 he was appointed professor at the University at Buffalo in the USA , in 1958 he moved to the University of Virginia and in 1964 he came to the University of Chicago , where he remained Professor of Law and Economics until his retirement in 1982. He was a member of the Mont Pelerin Society and was admitted to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1978 . In 1985 he became a corresponding member of the British Academy .

Coase died on September 2, 2013 at the age of 102.

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In the economic debate, the name of Ronald Coase stands above all for two groundbreaking essays, on which essential theories are based, with which economics argues today:

In 1937 Coase published the article The Nature of the Firm in the journal Economica . In it, he describes companies as a hierarchical network of contracts and explains their existence with the transaction costs that arise when using markets: Within companies, certain transactions can be carried out at lower costs than via markets. This is especially true for recurring transactions. Although Coase later stated that he was not even aware of the consequences of his train of thought, this article is regarded as the initial spark for the contract-oriented consideration of economic activity, which was later reflected in the theories of New Institutional Economics . These include the “theory of incomplete contracts”, the transaction cost theory and the principal-agent theory . Eighty years after the article appeared, Economica Coase started the Coase lecture in honor of it, which takes place every two years.

In 1960, Coase returned to a subject of contract theory and, in The problem of social cost, described the difficulties that external effects of economic activity trigger if the property rights concerned are not clearly assigned. This essay, a milestone in the theory of property rights theory , influenced the subsequent debates and is still effective today, for example in the area of environmental protection , where emissions trading goes back to the Coase theorem named after him.

In the field of microeconomics he devoted himself to a. the price-setting behavior of a monopoly that manufactures durable goods. Coase suspected that such a monopoly behaves in the borderline case as in complete competition , since the provider competes with itself over several periods ( Coase conjecture ).

During his time as a professor in Chicago, he edited the renowned Journal of Law and Economics .

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literature

See also

Web links

Commons : Ronald Coase  - Collection of pictures, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ^ A b University Of Chicago News Office: Ronald H. Coase, Founding Scholar in Law and Economics, 1910-2013 ( Memento of September 5, 2013 in the Internet Archive ) . Obituary from the University of Chicago. September 2, 2013. Retrieved September 3, 2013.
  2. ^ Deceased Fellows. British Academy, accessed May 15, 2020 .
  3. ^ Ronald Coase: The Nature of the Firm . In: Economica , 1937.
  4. ^ Economica Coase-Phillips Lectures. lsc.ac.uk ( London School of Economics ), accessed on November 3, 2015 .
personal data
SURNAME Coase, Ronald
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Coase, Ronald Harry (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION British economist and Nobel Prize winner in economics
DATE OF BIRTH December 29, 1910
PLACE OF BIRTH Willesden near London
DATE OF DEATH 2. September 2013
Place of death Chicago