Ronald Coase

Ronald Harry Coase (1910 to 2013) was a British economist and author who was educated at the London School of Economics, where he was a member of the faculty until 1951, and who became the Clifton R. Musser Professor of Economics at the University of Chicago Law School, arriving in 1964. He received the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 1991. He 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 were it not for transaction costs.