R. C. O. Matthews Quotes

Robert Charles Oliver Matthews was an economist and chess problemist.

Matthews was born in Edinburgh. He was educated at Edinburgh Academy and Corpus Christi College, Oxford, and was a Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford. He was the Drummond Professor of Political Economy at Oxford from 1965 to 1975 and the Professor of Political Economy at Cambridge from 1980 to 1991. He was also the Master of Clare College, Cambridge from 1975 to 1993.

As a chess problemist he specialised in the composition of directmate three-movers, a field in which he was recognised as one of the world's leading exponents.

Matthews wrote many books on economics, among which:

The Trade Cycle, Cambridge University Press, 1960

A Study in Trade-Cycle History: Economic Fluctuations in Great Britain 1833-1842, 1954

Economic Growth and Resources, Palgrave Macmillan, 1980

Economic Growth and Resources: Volume 2, Trends and Factors, Palgrave Macmillan, 1980

British Economic Growth 1856-1973 , Clarendon Press, 1982He also wrote two books on chess problems:

Chess Problems: Introduction to an art , 1963

Mostly Three-Movers: Collected Chess Problems 1939-1993, Feenschach-Phénix, Aachen, 1995 Wikipedia

✵ 16. June 1927 – 19. June 2010

R. C. O. Matthews: 4 quotes0 likes

Famous R. C. O. Matthews Quotes

“R. C. O. Matthews (1986), "Presidential Address to the Royal Economic Society." as cited in Eggertsson”

R. C. O. Matthews

1990; 31-32

“[Neoinstitutional Economics…] theory has made an indispensable contribution in recent times to advances of understanding in this area. But it seems to me that in the economics of institutions theory is now outstripping empirical research to an excessive extent. No doubt the same could be said of other fields in economics, but there is a particular point about this one. Theoretical modelling may or may not be more difficult in this field than in others, but empirical work is confronted by a special difficulty. Because economic institutions are complex, they do not lend themselves easily to quantitative measurement. Even in the respects in which they do, the data very often are not routinely collected by national statistical offices. As a result, the statistical approach which has become the bread and butter of applied economics is not straightforwardly applicable. Examples of it do exist, the literature on the economics of slavery being perhaps the most fully developed - not surprisingly because slavery is an institution that is sharply defined. But to a large extent the empirical literature has consisted of case-studies which are interesting but not necessarily representative, together with a certain amount on legal court cases, which are almost certainly not representative. Is this the best we can do? There is a challenge here on the empirical side to economists to see what is the best way forward.”

R. C. O. Matthews

“The fundamental idea of transaction costs is that they consist of the cost of arranging a contract ex ante and monitoring and enforcing it ex post, as opposed to production costs, which are the costs of executing a contract.”

R. C. O. Matthews

Source: "The Economics of Institutions and the Sources of Growth." 1986, p. 904; as cited in Eggertsson (1990; 14)

“"The chief fault in English economists at the beginning of the [nineteenth] century was… that they did not see how liable to change are the habits and institutions of industry." Thus Marshall in his inaugural lecture as Professor of Political Economy in Cambridge, referring to Ricardo (Marshall 1885, p. 155). In the circumstances of that occasion, the remark may have been intended in some part as an olive branch, because the only other serious contender for the Chair had been the High Tory economic historian William Cunningham, Archdeacon of Ely, famous as an anti-theoretical institutionalist and famous also as a polemicist - he was the clergyman who once told his congregation that for him the bliss of Heaven would be incomplete if it lacked the pleasures of controversy.”

R. C. O. Matthews

Source: "The Economics of Institutions and the Sources of Growth." 1986, p. 903

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