Thirty years ago "The Problem of Social Cost" [1960] was published. It transformed the field of Industrial Organization and greatly expanded its scope. We briefly survey the state of the field before 1960, and then show some of the ways by which Coase's paper changed economic thinking

Monetarists blamed fluctuations in inflation on excessively volatile growth in monetary aggregates. The data supported this hypothesis until 1982. Since 1983 monetary aggregates have been essentially uncorrelated with subsequent inflation in the US. Kochin (1973) argued that well designed...