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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 economics and the analysis of institutions by no means originated with or evolved solely from Coase's work, it is undeniable that his contributions, particularly in The Nature of the Firm and The Problem of Social Cost, played a major role in shaping the contemporary manifestations of these areas of inquiry. This volume focuses on the firm, the Coase theorem, and law and economics - those aspects of economic analysis with which Coase is most closely identified. Along with these come several essays on methodology and one on transitional economies, all against the underlying background of Coase's contributions and influence, and the implications of these for how we do economics. Taken together, this volume offers a unique perspective on `Coasean Economics' as well as on the potential future direction of economic analysis

In this article, Steven Medema provides some reflections on his tenure as editor of the Journal of the History of Economic Thought (1999 – 2008). This was a time of significant transition in the life of the journal, and the successful navigation of this period provides an excellent illustration of how much an editor and a journal rely on the assistance and support of both key individuals and the broader community of scholars in the field.

Though the Chicago school has been the subject of no small amount of research over the past several decades, that scholarship has focused largely on persons, ideas, and influence—in short, on the school itself. No attention has been paid to the origins of that label and the avenues via which the notion of a "Chicago school" of economics came to be. This paper attempts to address that lacuna, drawing on both published and archival resources. What emerges is a story of a label of uncertain origin but wrapped up in competing agendas, the first stage in the history of which culminates in 1962 with its rejection by two of the very people who helped birth it.

The notion of a Pigovian tradition in externality theory, against which Ronald Coase and others reacted beginning in the 1960s, has a long history. This article, though, suggests that the literature of economics evidences no such tradition, and that the discussion of externalities largely disappeared from the literature following Pigou's 1920 treatment, only to reemerge, in very different form, in the 1950s. Such concern as there was with externalities was largely technical—as an impediment to the attainment of an efficient equilibrium—rather than with externalities as important real-world phenomena that required addressing via "Pigovian" policy instruments. It was only in the late 1950s and 1960s, with the growing social and political concern about large-scale pollution, that externality analysis came to capture the attention of economists, but even this early work on environmental topics was less straightforwardly Pigovian than one might expect.

The history of economics, properly read, is very much a history of economics in the public sphere. Sir William Petty developed his most important insights in the process of providing advice on taxation to the monarch. Adam Smith wrote with a view to influencing the habits of thought of both the educated layman and policy makers. Jane Marcet and Harriet Martineau brought early classical political economy to the masses. David Ricardo formulated foundational elements of the nineteenth-century classical system writing policy pamphlets and then entered Parliament with a view to putting policy making on a solid economic footing. Karl Marx's intended audience was anything but the practitioners of the emerging science of political economy. Alfred Marshall buried his technical analysis in appendices to maximize the exposure of his work. John Maynard Keynes's influence can be ascribed, without too much injustice, as much to his effectiveness outside the walls of Cambridge as within them and to the use by others of his ideas in that same public realm. Yet, despite this lengthy history of economists' engagements with various publics, including those pulling the levers of policy, those writing on the history of economics have focused far more intently on the history of theory and the implications for the construction of a body of thought known as "economic analysis" than on the interplay among economists, economic ideas, and the public realm. It is as if the economic conversation went on solely within the space of academic departments of economics, even though those spaces are very recent creations.