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 the...

Adam Smith turned economic theory on its head in 1776 when he declared that the pursuit of self-interest mediated by the market itself--not by government--led, via an invisible hand, to the greatest possible welfare for society as a whole. The Hesitant Hand examines how subsequent economic...

This collection assesses the development of `Coasean Economics' - those aspects of economic analysis that have evolved out of the ground-breaking work of Ronald Coase. Two major strands of research can be identified here: law and economics and the New Institutional Economics. While both law and...

Tiziano Raffaelli (Pisa 1950) was a widely esteemed scholar in the field of the history and methodology of economics, who died suddenly in January 2016 while still in the midst of working and of developing projects for new lines of research. He was a philosopher of science by formation and a...