CHICAGO — Nobel Prize winner Ronald Coase, a pioneer in applying economic theory to the law, has died at age 102. The former University of Chicago professor was the oldest living Nobel laureate before his death Monday at a Chicago hospital.

The British-born economist won the Nobel in 1991 for expanding economic theory to include simple but neglected concepts such as property rights and overhead costs. His work generated a new way of thinking about government regulation, without condemning all regulation as bad, said Michael Schill, University of Chicago Law School dean. “It’s impossible to overstate the influence of Ronald on the law,” Schill said. “Ronald was one of the founding fathers of (the field of) law and economics.”

Coase was born in suburban London in 1910. He wore leg braces as a child and was sent to a school for “physical defectives,” he recalled in a biographical essay he wrote for the Nobel Prize organization. He hadn’t taken Latin, so a degree in history — his first choice — was impossible.

That became “one of those accidental factors which seem to have shaped my life,” he wrote, and led him to economics.

Coase’s ideas grew from roots in the real world. In the 1930s he toured U.S. factories. What he learned shaped his first significant paper, “The Nature of the Firm,” published in 1937.