Wednesday, September 06, 2006

Collected Works of Armen Alchain

Liberty Fund just announced that it will publish a two volume set of Armen Alchian's scholarly papers later this year.

Armen, of course, is one of the major contributors to the economic approach to property rights, theory of money, theory of unemployment, transaction cost economics, and the theory of the firm. He is also the thesis adviser of Steven N.S. Cheung, another important figure in the development of transaction costs economics.

Believe it or not, my guess is that more students here in Hong Kong have heard about Armen's name than their US counterparts. Why? Because Armen's text (co-authored with Bill Allen also at UCLA) Exchange and Production has been adopted as the required text for economics in our college entrance exams.

When I studied in the US, I was quite surprised when another student of Alchian's at UCLA, Walter Williams used the same book as the text for first year Ph.D. Micro.

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