Mark D. White

I am extremely saddened to say that Professor Ronald Coase passed away on September 2, 2013. He had a tremendous impact on economics, writing two seminal papers, "The Nature of the Firm" and "The Problem of Social Cost," that paved the way for both law-and-economics and new institutional economics and were the chief citations for his Nobel Prize in Economics in 1991. My copies of his books The Firm, the Market, and the Law (containing the two papers above) and Essays on Economics and Economists are well-worn but I still benefit every time I return to them. Always skeptical of excessive formalism, in recent years he had been working to return the focus of economics to real-world concerns with a new journal titled Man and the Economy.

He was a tremendous influence on me and my thought, and I will miss him dearly.