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Before the publication of Ronald Coase’s “The Nature of the Firm,” new developments in the theory of the firm were under way in the works of Arnold Plant at the LSE, and Dennis Robertson, Frederick Lavington, and Austin Robinson among the Cambridge Marshallians. Although in disagreement on industrial policy, these economists shared the belief that the common view that bigger firms are always more efficient—a very popular view within the movement for industrial ‘rationalization’—was untenable from a theoretical point of view. In the works of these economists the ‘make or buy’ scheme is sometimes employed, and Coase’s idea of a cost for using the market can be found, in implicit form, in some writings of Plant that appeared before Coase’s article. But the fundamental principle that we now call “transaction costs” was hardly of any help to any of those who, at Cambridge as well as at the LSE, were insisting on the costs of coordination as a limit to the growth of the firm. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The aim of this paper is to assess to what extent Keynes, or any other speculator, could ever have used the theory of futures contracts he formulated in the 1920s as the guiding principle for their investment strategy and what light the theory can shed on speculative behaviour. To this end, we focus our attention on Keynes’ speculations on the cotton market. Our main conclusion is that Keynes did not base his speculation in cotton exclusively on the assumption that futures prices were downward biased in comparison with spot prices, as his theory would predict. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]