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...

Though the Chicago school has been the subject of no small amount of research over the past several decades, that scholarship has focused largely on persons, ideas, and influence - in short, on the school itself. No attention has been paid to the origins of that label and the avenues via which...

This paper revisits the path by which Coase developed the result now known as the Coase theorem, including the famous meeting at the home of Aaron Director during which Coase ‘converted’ a group of Chicago economists to his way of thinking. Drawing on published and archival sources, we...

This paper examines the evolving role played by the Coase theorem over the several editions of Richard Posner’s Economic Analysis of Law. In doing so, the paper shows both the grounding of Posner’s efficiency norm in the theorem’s logic and his increasing emphasis on the theorem’s...

In a paper delivered at the December 1955 meeting of the Econometric Society, Paul Samuelson noted that though economists had done "work of high quality and great quantity in the field of taxation," the theory of public expenditure had been "relatively neglected" (1958, 332). Anglo-American...