Welcome to Econ Talk, part of the Library of Economics and Liberty. I'm your host Russ Roberts

of Stanford University's Hoover Institution. Our website is econtalk.org or you can subscribe,

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Today is October 23rd, 2013, and my guest is Don Boudreau of George Mason University.

Don and I share the blog Cafe Hayek. Don, welcome back to Econ Talk. Glad to be here.

Our topic for today is the intellectual legacy of Ronald Kos, the Nobel laureate who passed away

in September at the age of 102, and Kos was a guest on Econ Talk in May of 2012. Don,

today's guest is a longtime teacher of Lawn Economics, and I thought and contributed to the literature.

And I thought it'd be nice to talk about Kos's intellectual legacy. So we're going to talk

about his most important papers today of which it's a relatively small number.

Incredibly influential. Kos wrote more than most people realize he wrote. But when you compare his

total corpus to that of most Nobel Prize-winning economists, it is relatively small.

Shockingly small, in terms of number. Huge in terms of insight per word.

And influence on the profession as well. So we're going to focus, just to give people a heads-up,

we're going to focus on four of his papers. The two most important are the Nature of the Firm,

which was published in 1937 in Economica, and the Problem of Social Cost, which was published

in 1960 in the Journal of Law and Economics. But hoping we'll have time at the end

to give significant time for the marginal cost controversy, which is 1946 in Economica.

Economica. And the Lighthouse in Economics, which is Journal of Law and Economics 1974.

I believe 74. 74. And we'll put links as best we can to those. There's certainly some of them

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