5 September 2013

Event planned to honour Nobel Laureate Ronald Coase

The huge contribution made to modern economics by Nobel Laureate Ronald Coase, who died this week, will be marked later this year with an event at the University of Dundee.

Ronald Coase was a founding lecturer of the Dundee School of Economics and Commerce, which subsequently became part of the University.

Coase, who was awarded an honorary Doctor of Laws by the University of Dundee in 1992, came to Dundee in 1932 to take up an assistant lectureship in the newly founded School of Economics and Commerce, having freshly graduated from the London School of Economics with a Bachelor of Commerce. While the Dundee School was initially set up as an entity independent of the University it marked the beginning of the study of modern economics in Dundee and as such has played a significant role in shaping the development of Economic Studies in the University to the present day.

The School of Business at the University is now planning to host a seminar event later this year to commemorate Coase's contribution to economic thought at Dundee.

Seen by many as having laid the intellectual foundations for the rise of broadcasting license auctions and of carbon trading, Ronald Coase died on Monday after a scholarly career that saw him publishing ongoing research almost literally to his final days.

Speaking from the 2013 UK History of Economic Thought Conference in Sheffield where he is currently presenting a paper on the economics of Ronald Coase, Matthias Klaes, Dean of the School of Business and Professor of History and Philospohy of Economics, commented, "When Coase used his Dundee lectures to talk to his students about his newly found insights on the economics of the business firm, he could not have envisaged that the Swedish Academy would award him almost sixty years later the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for those ideas.

'As a matter of fact, those insights were largely neglected by the profession for thirty years. Nor would he have anticipated then that these insights would continue to impact on such transformative geopolitical events as the Chinese economic reforms and that he would continue to publish and give interviews to the Wall Street Journal on this topic as a centenarian.'

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