"Austrian and Neoclassical Economics: Any Gains From Trade?" is volume one of a series of seven lectures sponsored by Liberty Fund and the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago in celebration of the hundredth anniversary of F. A. Hayek's birth.
One of the leading macroeconomists in the United States, Rosen researched such fields as theoretical and empirical work on income distribution, dynamics of professional labor markets, health economics, social security, and group decision-making.

A staunch neoclassical economist, Sherwin Rosen drew inspiration from Adam Smith's "Wealth of Nations," particularly his theory of compensating wage differentials, which Rosen felt was central to all economic problems involving product differentiation and spatial considerations. The main theme of his collection is how markets handle diversity, including the determination of value in the presence of diversity, the allocation of idiosyncratic buyers to specialized sellers, and the effects of heterogeneity and sorting on inequality.

Rosen felt that good economics required combining simple but powerful concepts such as optimizing and equilibrium with careful empirical analysis. It was important for the relatively simple rules of behavior implied by rationality to have useful, empirically descriptive content and predictive power. If they did, it was often possible to infer underlying structure (tastes and technology, for example) from actual behavior. Using this approach, Rosen was able to develop powerful insights into such phenomena as the enormous salaries paid to sports and entertainment stars and top business executives. He also explored with fruitful results the premium paid to workers in risky jobs, learning and experience in the labor market, and other labor market phenomena.