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William Lazonick

William Lazonick, professor emeritus of economics at University of Massachusetts, is co-founder and president of the , a 501(c)(3) non-profit research organization, based in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He is an Open Society Fellow and a Canadian Ա for Advanced Research Fellow.Over the past decade, the Ա has funded a number of his research projects.

He has professorial affiliations with SOAS University of London and Institut Mines-Télécom in Paris. Previously, Lazonick was assistant and associate professor of economics at Harvard University, professor of economics at Barnard College of Columbia University, and distinguished research professor at INSEAD in France. Lazonick earned his B.Com. at the University of Toronto, M.Sc. in Economics at London School of Economics, and Ph.D. in Economics at Harvard University. He holds honorary doctorates from Uppsala University and the University of Ljubljana.

His research focuses on the social conditions of innovation and economic development in advanced and emerging economies. His book ? Business Organization and High-Tech Employment in the United States (Upjohn Ա 2009) won the 2010 Schumpeter Prize. He has twice—in 1983 and 2010—had the award from Harvard Business School for best article of the year in Business History Review. In 2014, he received the HBR McKinsey Award for outstanding article in Harvard Business Review for “: Stock Buybacks Manipulate the Market and Leave Most Americans Worse Off.” In January 2020, Oxford University Press published his book, co-authored with Jang-Sup Shin, Predatory Value Extraction: How the Looting of the Business Corporation Became the U.S. Norm and How Sustainable Prosperity Can Be Restored.

By this expert

How the Disappearance of Unionized Jobs Obliterated an Emergent Black Middle Class

Paper Working Paper Series | | Jun 2020

In this introduction to our project, “Fifty Years After: Black Employment in the United States Under the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission,” we outline the socioeconomic forces behind the promising rise and disastrous fall of an African American blue-collar middle class.

4 Ways to Eradicate the Corporate Disease That is Worsening the Covid-19 Pandemic

Article | Mar 23, 2020

It’s time for business executives, employees, and taxpayers to come together to help get us out of the pandemic and create conditions for a sustainable and equitable future

Is the Most Unproductive Firm the Foundation of the Most Efficient Economy?

Article | Jan 31, 2020

How Penrosian Learning Confronts the Neoclassical Fallacy

Is the Most Unproductive Firm the Foundation of the Most Efficient Economy? Penrosian Learning Confronts the Neoclassical Fallacy

Paper Working Paper Series | | Jan 2020

To get beyond the neoclassical fallacy, economists have to stop relying on constrained-optimization methodology

Featuring this expert

Tomorrow’s Detroits & Detroit’s Tomorrows

Event Conference Race & Economics | Nov 11–12, 2016

Economics has a race problem.

Lazonick links stock buybacks to America’s jobs challenge

Video | Nov 4, 2016

In an Al Jazeera documentary “In Search of the Great American Job”, Ա scholar William Lazonick offers some arch insights into the relationship between financialization — particularly the “shareholder value” ideology in corporations, which drives the transfer of profits to shareholders through stock buybacks — and job creation and inequality.

Yellen Challenges Economists Amid Elusive Great Recovery

Article | Oct 24, 2016

Like the Great Depression and the stagflation of the ’70s, the anemic growth of the U.S. economy can’t be understood or remedied without changes in economists’ thinking

Three Things to Know to Hold Wells Fargo Accountable

Article | Oct 11, 2016

Justice requires that the media, policy makers, and the public understand why corporations engage in misconduct and fraud