Ronald Coase, who has died aged 102, played a key part in developing the intellectual arguments behind the market revolution in the 1980s.
Yet when he won the Nobel Prize for economics in 1991, it was for two articles published almost a quarter of a century apart. The first, “The Nature of the Firm”, was conceived while he was an undergraduate on a trip to the US and for the first time provided a rigorous explanation of why companies exist. People created companies, said Coase, to avoid what he called “marketing costs”.
His second influential paper, “The Problem of Social Cost”, came 23 years later in 1960, and showed that the case for government intervention in the marketplace was far weaker than economists had previously thought.
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