Short answers, pulled from the story.
The Chicago school of economics is a neoclassical school of economic thought associated with the faculty at the University of Chicago. It is a school of thought rather than a formal organization, built on price theory, monetarism, and a skepticism of government intervention. Milton Friedman and George Stigler are considered its leading scholars.
As of 2022, the University of Chicago Economics Department has been awarded 15 Nobel Memorial Prizes in Economic Sciences, more than any other university. The first prize awarded to the department came in 1976, when Milton Friedman won for his work in consumption analysis, monetary history, and stabilization policy.
The Chicago school as a distinct tradition emerged in the 1950s, with Milton Friedman and George Stigler recognized as the leaders of its second generation. Earlier foundational figures include Frank Knight, Henry Simons, Jacob Viner, and Aaron Director, who shaped the intellectual environment from the 1920s through the 1940s.
Milton Friedman argued that the Great Depression was caused by the Federal Reserve's policies through the 1920s and was worsened by those same policies in the 1930s. He made this case most fully in A Monetary History of the United States, published in 1963, for which he shared credit as co-author.
The efficient-market hypothesis, originated by Eugene Fama, holds that at any point in time the actual price of a security is a good estimate of its intrinsic value. Fama first defined it in a 1965 article, developed it further in a 1970 article, and updated the theory again in a 1991 article. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2013 for his empirical work on asset pricing.
The Coase theorem, developed by Ronald Coase in his 1960 article "The Problem of Social Cost", holds that in a world without transaction costs people would always bargain to the same allocation of resources regardless of how a court ruled in a property dispute. Coase illustrated the argument using an 1879 London nuisance case, Sturges v Bridgman, involving a noisy sweetmaker and a quiet doctor. He won the Nobel Prize in Economics in 1991.