Monday 11 June 2012

Ronald Coase's theory of the firm and the family

A video on the theory of the firm applied to the family, In what ways is a family a firm? Mary Anne Case, professor of Law at the University of Chicago Law School, puts her work on reproductive technologies and on analogies in the governing of marriage and business corporations in an explicitly Coasian context. She analyzes the long history and recent past to make predictions about the future of families, sex, and society.

We are now generally free, as Coase observes, to structure our business affairs in corporate or partnership form, as a franchise operation, or as a sole proprietorship. Both law and society now offer a variety of ways to structure one's personal life: the provision of sex and care, and the production of children can each now be outsourced or internalised within a legally recognised family structure.


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