Coase Foundation Mission Statement
The Coase Foundation is not another “think tank.” No think tank organizes itself with The Coase Foundation’s focus on the economic policies that concern the modern corporation.
The organizers of the Coase Foundation believe that the conglomerate think tanks have become too unfocused and politically partisan, with the result that rigorous legal and economic analysis of policies affecting the firm has suffered.
The Coase Foundation will:
- Influence the course of debate over important, emerging issues in antitrust, corporate governance, innovation and intellectual property, regulation, environmental policy, and related areas of law and economics.
- Possess a comparative advantage to identify and analyze key issues before others do.
- Produce intellectually rigorous economic analysis free from unsubstantiated opinion, conjecture, and hyperbole.
- Produce work that will have a practical impact in Washington, D.C. and other centers of government.
- Be organized around the intellectual interests and research agendas of a small number of distinguished scholars who have the freedom to speak their minds because they have already achieved professional eminence and financial independence, rather than organizing around pre-selected subject areas for which scholars must be recruited.
- Not associate itself, formally or informally, with any political party or seek to compete with think tanks in validating or advocating any company’s or any interest group’s particular policy agenda.
- Adhere to standards of rigor and objectivity comparable to those in the top U.S. research universities.
- Function as a platform for the presentation and dissemination of policy research, rather than commissioning it, by:
- Submitting briefs amicus curiae of informed scholars in court cases of great consequence to the public interest.
- Underwriting the production of the Journal of Competition Law & Economics by the Oxford University Press.
- Convening workshops and conference events.
- Endow and award an annual Coase Prize in Law & Economics to recognize scholarship that has applied economics to legal problems in a way that concretely improved public policy.
