Welcome to the first installment of our series of discussions of the Most Insightful Articles in economics. Today we are discussing Ronald Coase’s 1937 article The Nature of the Firm. Ronald Coase wrote only a handful of academic journal articles—nearly every one is a blockbuster. He won the Nobel Prize in 1991 “for his discovery and clarification of the significance of transaction costs and property rights for the institutional structure and functioning of the economy.” He is still alive at the ripe old age of 99; if you do the math, that means he wrote the article we are discussing today when he was 26. This gives me the sneaking suspicion that I am “behind.”