Naomi Lamoreaux

 
Ph.D., History, Johns Hopkins University, 1979
B.A., History, SUNY, Binghamton, 1972

Naomi R. Lamoreaux is Stanley B. Resor Professor of Economics and History at Yale University and a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research. She received her Ph.D. in history from Johns Hopkins in 1979 and has taught at Brown and the University of California, Los Angeles before coming to Yale in 2010. She has written The Great Merger Movement in American Business, 1895-1904 and Insider Lending:  Banks, Personal Connections, and Economic Development in Industrial New England, edited eight other books, and published numerous articles on business, economic, and financial history.  She also co-edited the Journal of Economic History.  Lamoreaux has been elected president of the Business History Conference and the Economic History Association and is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the Cliometrics Society.  She has been awarded the Alice Hanson Jones book prize, the Henrietta Larson, PEAES, and Arthur Cole article prizes, the Harold Williamson Prize for an outstanding business historian in mid-career, the Cliometrics award for exceptional support to that field, and the Business History Conference’s Lifetime Achievement Award.  Her current research interests include patenting and the market for technology in the late nineteenth and twentieth century U.S., business organizational forms and contractual freedom in the U.S. and Europe in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the public/private distinction in U.S. history, and constitutional change in the U.S. state government in the nineteenth century.

Some recent publications:

Naomi Lamoreaux and Ian Shapiro, eds., The Bretton Woods Agreements:  Together with Scholarly Commentaries and Essential Historical Documents (New Haven, Conn.:  Yale University Press, forthcoming).

Ron Harris and Naomi R. Lamoreaux, “Opening the Black Box of the Common-Law Legal Regime:  Contrasts in the Development of Corporate Law in Britain and the United States in the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries,” Business History, forthcoming.

Naomi R. Lamoreaux and John Joseph Wallis, eds., Organizations, Civil Society, and the Roots of Development (Chicago:  University of Chicago Press, December 2017).

Naomi R. Lamoreaux and William Novak, eds., Corporations and American Democracy (Cambridge, Mass.:  Harvard University Press, 2017).

Timothy W. Guinnane, Ron Harris, and Naomi R. Lamoreaux, “Contractual Freedom and Corporate Governance in Britain in the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries,” Business History Review 91 (Summer 2017), 227-77.

Naomi R. Lamoreaux, “Corporate Governance and the Expansion of the Democratic Franchise:  Beyond Cross-Country Regressions,” Scandinavian Economic History Review 64 (issue 2, 2016): 103-121.

Bruce G. Carruthers and Naomi R. Lamoreaux, “Regulatory Races:  The Effects of Jurisdictional Competition on Regulatory Standards,” Journal of Economic Literature 54 (March 2016): 52-97.

Naomi R. Lamoreaux, “Beyond the Old and the New:  Economic History in the United States,” in The Routledge Handbook of Global Economic History, ed. Francesco Boldizzoni and Pat Hudson (London:  Routledge, 2016), 35-54.

Working Papers

Ron Harris and Naomi R. Lamoreaux, “Opening the Black Box of the Common-Law Legal Regime:  Contrasts in the Development of Corporate Law in Britain and the United States in the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries” (2018).

“Online Appendix for Opening the Black Box of the Common-Law Legal Regime” (2018)

Naomi R. Lamoreaux and John Joseph Wallis, “Fixing the Machine that Would Not Go of Itself:  State Constitutional Change and the Creation of an Open-Access Social Order in the Mid-Nineteenth-Century United States” (2018)

Ruth H. Bloch and Naomi R. Lamoreaux, “Voluntary Associations, Corporate Rights, and the State: Legal Constraints on the Development of American Civil Society,” NBER Working Paper 21153 (2015).

Naomi R. Lamoreaux and Margaret Levenstein, “Patenting in an Entrepreneurial Region during the Great Depression:  The Case of Cleveland, Ohio” (2015).

Additional Fields of Interest: 

Economic and business history, Business organizational forms, Corporate governance, Intellectual property, Inventive activity, Public-private distinction