Professor Ronald Coase is currently Clifton R. Musser Professor Emeritus of Economics and Senior Fellow in Law and Economics at the University of Chicago Law School, where he has been on the faculty since 1964. Earlier he served on the faculty of the Dundee School of Economics and Commerce (1932-1934), the University of Liverpool (1934-1935), the London School of Economics (1935-1951), the University of Buffalo (1951-1958), and the University of Virginia (1958-1964).
Professor Coase was editor of the Journal of Law and Economics (1964-1982). He was the founding president of the International Society for New Institutional Economics (1996-97). He is the research advisor to the Ronald Coase Institute.
For his discovery and clarification of the significance of transaction costs and property rights for the institutional structure and functioning of the economy, Professor Coase was awarded the Alfred Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 1991.
Professor Coase’s insight on property rights and contractual arrangements of production is highly informative to our understanding of the operation and evolution of the actual economic system. In China, for example, Coasean economics, as expounded and developed by Steven N.S. Cheung and others, has proved out to be of far-reaching practical significance. Coasean economics has set up a high standard for problem-focused and policy-oriented scholarship at the School of Global Studies.
Among his many publications are The Firm, the Market and the Law (1988) and Essays on Economics and Economists (1994). “The Nature of the Firm” (1937) and “The Problem of Social Cost” (1960) are two of his most known articles, which together helped to lay a theoretical foundation for modern theories of the firm, transaction cost economics, property rights economics, new institutional economics, as well as law and economics. Recently, Professor Coase published “The Conduct of Economics: The Example of Fisher Body and General Motors” (2006). Professor Coase is currently pursuing research in the origin of natural monopoly doctrine, the organizational structure of production and exchange, and the role of expectation in the working of the economy.
Professor Coase has held a Sir Ernest Cassel Travelling Scholarship and a Rockefeller Fellowship. He has also been a Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, Stanford, California. Professor Coase is a Fellow of the British Academy, the European Academy, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He is a member of the Honour Committee of Euroscience. He holds honorary doctorate degrees from the University of Cologne, Yale University, Washington University, the University of Dundee, the University of Buckingham, Beloit College, the University of Paris, and Clemson University.