William Lazonick

William Lazonick is professor of economics emeritus at University of Massachusetts, is co-founder and president of the Academic-Industry Research Network, a non-profit research organization. He was also a professor at Harvard, Columbia, and INSEAD.  Lazonick earned his B PhD in Economics at Harvard and holds honorary doctorates from Uppsala and Ljubljana.

The project

Title: Transmission of Shareholder-Value Ideology and Practice from the USA to Europe since the Late 1980s

The research in which he will be engaged during his stay at Maison Suger is part of a project on the rise to dominance of “maximizing shareholder value” (MSV) as an ideology of corporate governance in the United States since the 1980s and its subsequent transmission to other nations. He will be working with Professor Marie Carpenter of Institut Mines-Télécom and Professor Mustafa Erdem Sakinç of Université Sorbonne Paris Nord on the history of the transmission of MSV from the United States to France as well as to the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) as a key element in its principles of corporate governance.

Hosting Institution: Institut Mines-Télécom Business School

Selective bibliography

• William Lazonick, Investing in Innovation: Confronting Predatory Value Extraction in the U.S. Corporation, Cambridge University Press, 2023.
• William Lazonick and Yin Li, “From Technology Transfer to Indigenous Innovation in China,” Entreprises et Histoire, forthcoming.
• William Lazonick, Innovative Enterprise, Industrial Leadership, and Sustainable Prosperity,” in Matthias Kipping, Takafumi Kurosawa, and Eleanor Westney, eds., The Oxford Handbook of Industry Dynamics, Oxford University Press, forthcoming.
• William Lazonick, “Is the Most Unproductive Firm the Foundation of the Most Efficient Economy? Penrosian Learning and the Neoclassical Fallacy,” International Review of Applied Economics, 36, 2, 2022: 1-32.
• William Lazonick and Jang-Sup Shin, Predatory Value Extraction: How the Looting of the Business Corporation Became the US Norm and How Sustainable Prosperity Can Be Restored, Oxford University Press, 2020.