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...

Historians of economics have paid minimal attention to the diffusion of economic ideas in the textbook literature. Given the low esteem in which textbooks are held as embodiments of scholarship and the propensity of historians of economics - and intellectual historians generally - to focus on...

The Coase theorem tells us that monetary damages and specific performance remedies for breach of contract have identical effects when transaction costs are zero. This has become a standard part of the literature on the economics of contract law. This note argues that the traditional view is...

The diffusion of the Coase theorem into the economics literature has many facets, one of which lies in its use and treatment by environmental economists. This paper examines the first two decades of this history, a period during which the theorem's validity was widely acknowledged but its...

Adam Smith's discussion of the system of natural liberty, its effects on the functioning of the market system, and the resultant implications for the economic role of the state has formed the basis of much of the subsequent economic literature analyzing the interplay of market and state. While...

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...

Economists typically locate the origins of the theory of externalities in A.C. Pigou's The Economics of Welfare (1920, 1932), where Pigou suggested that activities which generate uncompensated benefits or costs—e.g., pollution, lighthouses, scientific research—represent instances of market...