The present paper revisits the path by which Coase came to set down the result now generally known as the Coase theorem in his 1960 article. I draw on both the published record and archival resources in an effort to clear away some of the mist and, as it will emerge, dispel some of the...

Apart from followers as Milton Friedman, Paul Samuelson, Ronald Coase, and Maurice Allais, most economists abandoned Irving Fisher’s economic framework after the post-1929 Great Crisis. Without citing Fisher however, in 1958 Franco Modigliani and Merton Miller reutilised his framework to found...

This paper describes James M. Buchanan’s analysis of human capital concepts in a class paper that he wrote in 1946 titled “Federalism: One Barrier to Labor Mobility.” The paper described how federal financing of human capital investments impeded labor mobility and formed the basis for his...

The paper aims to show how the formal revolution in economics has influenced the developments of Rational Choice and Game Theory in Political Science. Our focus will be on American political scientist William H. Riker (1920-1993). We want to show how Riker used game theory and adapted it to...

Plant (1937) versus Coase (1937) on the firm. Outlines of and comparisons between ‘The Nature of the Firm’ and ‘Centralise or Decentralise?’ are given. The nature of the relationship between the two papers is discussed

Abstract: Frank Knight was an enigmatic thinker: not only about economics, but also about individual and social behavior more generally, ethics, political philosophy, epistemology, and a number of other subjects. However, his views on some topics often created tensions with his views on other...

In this essay, we read McKenzie's seventeen paragraphs of 1957 on “demand theory without a utility index” as an opening to the narrative of 20th-century demand theory, and as a lever for the understanding of what has now reached culmination as the neoclassical theory of demand. In tracking...

This essay sets Chicago economics as an example for how today’s economics belittles the importance of explicit philosophical studies. Given that economists keep their methodological stances rather implicit, it is argued that the correct reconstruction of these hidden methodological foundations...

This paper provides a look into what Lucas meant by the term ‘analogue systems’ and how he conceived making them useful. It is argued that any model with remarkable predictive success can be regarded as an analogue system, the term is thus neutral in terms of usefulness. To be useful Lucas...

This introductory paper offers a look into the intellectual and technical progress that led Robert E. Lucas to his seminal paper entitled Expectations and the neutrality of money. It is argued that the neutrality paper applies the capital-theoretic approach of Lucas’s firm microeconomics of...