Ronald Coase, the 1991 winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics, died Monday at the age of 102. As one of the leading scholars of the law-and-economics movement, Coase reshaped the everyday understanding of economics with a series of pathbreaking studies on how corporations utilize resources, how pollution can be addressed by market forces, and how monopolies impede innovation.

Coase, born in Britain before World War I began, was originally placed in a school for “physical defectives” and given almost no formal education until the age of 10. He went on to study at the London School of Economics and always felt the profession was too “mathematized” and needed to deal with practical, real-world issues. His 1937 article “The Nature of the Firm,” written after he toured U.S. factories in the 1930s, changed forever the view of how corporations operate to achieve efficiency.

Coase also made a lasting impact as editor of the influential Journal of Law and Economics for almost 20 years. He made clear in a 1997 interview with Tom Hazlett in Reason magazine that he was not a libertarian, and that he would be happy to find an example of where government regulation was an overall benefit to society. But “I can’t remember one that’s good,” he told Hazlett. “Regulation of transport, regulation of agriculture — agriculture is a, zoning is z. You know, you go from a to z, they are all bad. There were so many studies, and the result was quite universal: The effects were bad . . . The most probable explanation was that the government now operates on such a massive scale that it had reached the stage of what economists call negative marginal returns. Anything additional it does, it messes up. But that doesn’t mean that if we reduce the size of government considerably, we wouldn’t find then that there were some activities it did well. Until we reduce the size of government, we won’t know what they are.”

Coase was active until the very end of his life. Last year, he co-authored a book with Ning Wang entitled “How China Became Capitalist.” It argued that China’s growth came not from the deliberate actions of its government but by the individual action of people who had been given some freedom.

“China became capitalist while it was trying to modernize socialism,” Coase and Wang wrote. “The story of China is the quintessence of what Adam Ferguson called ‘the products of human action but not human design.’ A Chinese proverb puts it more poetically: ‘The flowers planted on purpose do not blossom; the willows no one cared for have grown into big shade trees.’”