Coase, Ronald H.

Coase, Ronald H. (kōz), 1910–, American economist, b. London, Ph.D. Univ. of London, 1951. He was raised and educated in England before coming to the United States, where he has been a professor at the Univ. of Buffalo (1951–58), the Univ. of Virginia (1958–64), and the Univ. of Chicago (1964–). A pioneer in the field of transaction cost economics, he studied the ways in which legal rules affect economic behavior. He won the 1991 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences and wrote the influential essays "The Nature of the Firm" (1937) and "The Problems of Social Cost" (1959).