For most economists at Chicago, Marshall was simply an input, the supplier of an approach to economic analysis. For Ronald Coase, however, Marshall was much more than this - a subject of fascination and, at times, almost a reverence and obsession. Trained in the late 1920s and early 1930s at the...

Adam Smith turned economic theory on its head in 1776 when he declared that the pursuit of self-interest mediated by the market itself--not by government--led, via an invisible hand, to the greatest possible welfare for society as a whole. The Hesitant Hand examines how subsequent economic...

The Economy as Process of Valuation sheds new light on the potential benefits of concept and theory formation along dynamic and evolutionary lines for understanding economic processes. The emphasis is on aspects of the economy as a process of valuation rather than as a mechanistic result of...

This article investigates the effects of distributionally neutral tax changes on equity and efficiency using computational general equilibrium and stochastic dominance techniques. The authors find, for a tax increase, that the constant-tax-share definition is preferred both in terms of...

This article examines the first two decades of the history of the Coase theorem in environmental economics, a period during which the theorem's validity was widely acknowledged but its relevance for economic analysis of environmental issues was almost universally dismissed. The repeated claims...

The essays in this volume examine the economist as public intellectual. Rather than assessing the changing status of the public intellectual in culture or attempting to define the identity of the public intellectual, our approach is to study the public interventions of economists, that is, the...