William Lazonick

William Lazonick is a professor at the University of Massachusetts Lowell and a director of the UMass Lowell Center for Industrial Competitiveness.  He is also affiliated with the CNRS Groupe de Recherche en Economie Theorique et Appliquee, Universite Montesquieu Bordeaux IV, where he is engaged in collaborative research on finance, innovation, and growth, funded primarily by the European Commission.  He is directing an international project on financial instiutions for innovation and development, funded by the Ford Foundation, with a focus on the United States, Japan, and China. He is also collaborating on research projects based in Britain, France, Germany, Ireland, Sweden, and the United States.

Previously, Lazonick was Assistant and Associate Professor of Economics at Harvard University (1975-1984), Professor of Economics at Barnard College of Columbia University (1985-1993), and Visiting Scholar and then Distinguished Research Professor at INSEAD (1996-2007).  He has also been on the faculties of University of Toronto (1982-1983), Harvard Business School (1984-1986), and University of Tokyo (1996-1997), and was a visiting member of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton (1989-1990).

In 1991 Professor Lazonick was the first economist to serve as president of the Business History Conference, the main professional association of business historians in the United States.  His work through the early 1990s was the subject of a chapter in the volume, American Economists of the Late Twentieth Century (Elgar, 1996).  He was the youngest of 36 economists selected worldwide to write an autobiographical essay in "Exemplary Economists" (Elgar 2000).  He is the author or editor of twelve books including "Competitive Advantage on the Shop Floor" (Harvard University Press, 1990), and "Business Organization and the Myth of the Market Economy" (Cambridge University Press, 1991), and some 100 articles.  His latest book, "Sustainable Prosperity in the New Economy? Business Organization and High Tech Employment in the United States" (Upjohn Institute for Employment Research, 2009) has been awarded the 2010 Schumpeter Prize by the International Schumpeter Society [1].  Next year Oxford  University will publish his book, "Management Innovation: Essays in the Spirit of Alfred D. Chandler Jr.", co-edited with David J. Teece.

Media articles based on his research on the impacts of stock buy-backs and executive compensation on innovation and job creation have appeared in The Financial Times [2], The Observer [3], Business Week [4], Globe and Mail [5,5], USA Today [6], and Huffington Post [7,7], as well as many foreign-language newspapers.

In recent years, much of his work has been translated into Chinese, among a number of other foreign languages.  He is regularly invited to speak at academic conferences, research institutes, universities, government agencies, and corporate associations thoughout the world.

Professor Lazonick holds a Bachelors of Commerce from the University of Toronto (1968), a Master of Science degree in economics from the London school of Economics (1969), and a Doctor of Philosophy degree in economics from Harvard University (1975). In 1991 Uppsala University awarded him an honorary doctorate for his work on the theory and history of economic development.