This research project seeks to understand the social conditions that underpin the ability of national economies to generate stable and equitable economic growth. In particular, we focus on the ways in which different “business models” – characterized by certain types of investment strategies, organizational structures, and financial relations – support or undermine the quest for sustainable prosperity.
The current research agenda builds on a book manuscript, Sustainable Prosperity in the New Economy?, completed in January 2008 (see below) under a grant from the W. E. Upjohn Institute for Employment Research.Prior efforts include a project on corporate governance and sustainable prosperity conducted under the auspices of the Jerome Levy Economics Institute in the last half of the 1990s (see William Lazonick and Mary O’Sullivan, eds., Corporate Governance and Sustainable Prosperity, Palgrave 2002) and a project conducted at the European Institute of Business Administration (INSEAD) from 1999 to 2002 on corporate governance, innovation, and economic performance,(download the final report of this project) funded by the European Commission under the Fourth Framework Programme of Research and Technological Development. Additional funding was provided by the European Commission under the Sixth Framework Programme of Research and Technological Development through the project “European Socio-Economic Models of a Knowledge-Based Economy.”
Based on the research in Sustainable Prosperity in the New Economy, and an article "The US Stock Market and the Governance of Innovative Enterprise” that appeared in Industrial and Corporate Change in December 2007, Professor Lazonick is doing further research and writing on the role of the stock market in the US economy, with a particular emphasis on the impact on sustainable prosperity of the acceleration in corporate stock repurchases since 2003.
With Edward March and Öner Tulum, Lazonick is also directing research on the sustainability of the prevailing business model in the US biopharmaceutical industry. A paper “Boston’s Biotech Boom: A New ‘Massachusetts Miracle’?” can be downloaded here. This research explores the roles of government funding and subsidies, technological change, patent policy, product market demand (including government medical care programs), price regulation, the stock market, and corporate financial behavior on the performance of the biopharmaceutical industry.
William Lazonick,
Sustainable Prosperity in the New Economy?: Business Organization and High-Tech Employment in the United States
Chapters
Abstract and Table of Contents
One: What is New, and Permanent, about the “New Economy”?
Two: Business Models, Old and New
Three: Rise of the New Economy Business Model
Four: Restructuring the Old Economy Corporation
Five: Employment Relations and Pensions in the New Economy
Six: The Quest for “Shareholder Value”
Seven: Globalization of ICT Employment
Eight: Prospects for Sustainable Prosperity