Debating Law’s Irrelevance: Legal Scholarship and the Coase Theorem in the 1960s

Ronald Coase’s classic article, The Problem of Social Cost, is widely credited with playing a significant role in the development of the economic analysis of law—one of the most influential new movements in legal scholarship in the last third of the twentieth century. The traditional history here is that this impact came via two routes: one, through the effect of Coase’s article in stimulating economists to analyze issues that had traditionally been the province of legal scholars (that is, Coase as a stimulus for “economics imperialism”); and two, through Coase’s impact on the thinking of Richard Posner, who was moved to examine the efficiency of common law rules in part by his encounter with Coase’s remarks regarding the propensity of judges to make decisions that accorded with economists’ sensibilities. While each of these historical claims is true enough, the lines of scholarship that they reference commenced only in the 1970s. The genesis of the application of Coase’s insights—and, in particular, the negotiation result that came to be known as the “Coase theorem”—to legal issues came in the first half of the 1960s, and significantly, the roots of this work lie in the legal community, rather than the economics community

Cultures of Expertise and the Public Interventions of Economists

The essays in this volume examine the economist as public intellectual. Rather than assessing the changing status of the public intellectual in culture or attempting to define the identity of the public intellectual, our approach is to study the public interventions of economists, that is, the encounters between economists and their publics. In the volume we constrain ourselves to the long twentieth century in the United States and the United Kingdom, fenced at one end by the Progressive Era and Fabianism and the ongoing economic crisis at the other. Economists then and now have been occupants of the public sphere, and to understand their encounters with the public we must appreciate the expectations they bring to the meeting and the institutional contexts that enable the encounters. The unifying claim of our collection is that economists’ public interventions have been of profound consequence for both the structure and the content of the public sphere.</jats:p

QMRA in the Drinking Water Distribution System

AbstractA Quantitative Microbial Risk Assessment (QMRA) model was developed for contamination events after mains repairs. The sensitivity analysis showed that the contamination concentration is the most important parameter, next to the pathogen dose response relation. The time of opening valves and of consumption are also important parameters. The event location within the network and the amount of consumption are of smaller importance. Issuing a boil water advice and opening only one valve before “releasing” the entire isolation section are effective measures to reduce the number of infected people per event by a factor of 2 to 4

Introduction to Economics as a Public Science. Part II: Institutional Settings

This issue of Œconomia contains the second set of essays that emerged from the conference “Economics and Public Reason” hosted in May 2018 at the Centre Walras-Pareto for the History of Economic and Political Thought at the University of Lausanne.Ce numéro d’Œconomia contient la seconde série d’essais issue de la conférence « Economics and Public Reason » qui a été organisée en mai 2018 par le Centre Walras Pareto d’études interdisciplinaires de la pensée économique et politique à l’Université de Lausanne

plantiSMASH: automated identification, annotation and expression analysis of plant biosynthetic gene clusters

Plant specialized metabolites are chemically highly diverse, play key roles in host-microbe interactions, have important nutritional value in crops and are frequently applied as medicines. It has recently become clear that plant biosynthetic pathway-encoding genes are sometimes densely clustered in specific genomic loci: Biosynthetic gene clusters (BGCs). Here, we introduce plantiSMASH, a versatile online analysis platform that automates the identification of candidate plant BGCs. Moreover, it allows integration of transcriptomic data to prioritize candidate BGCs based on the coexpression patterns of predicted biosynthetic enzyme-coding genes, and facilitates comparative genomic analysis to study the evolutionary conservation of each cluster. Applied on 48 high-quality plant genomes, plantiSMASH identifies a rich diversity of candidate plant BGCs. These results will guide further experimental exploration of the nature and dynamics of gene clustering in plant metabolism. Moreover, spurred by the continuing decrease in costs of plant genome sequencing, they will allow genome mining technologies to be applied to plant natural product discovery.</p

Introduction to Economics as a Public Science

This short article introduces readers to the papers published in this issue on the theme of “public reason” in economics. It provides ground to the notion of “public reason” in economics as a two-way process taking place in interstitial spaces between economics, as an academic discipline, and the various publics in which economics—its concepts, tools, and methods— acquires meaning as an instrument of social understanding and political change