Naomi Lamoreaux

Naomi R. Lamoreaux is Stanley B. Resor Professor Emeritus of Economics and Professor Emeritus of History at Yale University, Senior Research Scholar at the University of Michigan Law School, and a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research. She received her Ph.D. in history from Johns Hopkins in 1979 and taught at Brown, the University of California, Los Angeles, and Yale. 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 nine other books, and published numerous articles on business, economic, and financial history. She also co-edited the Journal of Economic History from 1992 to 1996. Lamoreaux has served as Pitt Professor of American History and Institutions at the University of Cambridge in 2018-19 and Sunderland Faculty Fellow at the University of Michigan Law School in 2020-21. She 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, the Cliometrics Society, and the Economic History Association. 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 business organizational forms and contractual freedom in the US and Europe in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the public/private distinction in US history, state constitutional changes mandating general laws in the nineteenth-century US, and the US Patent Office as a site of learning in the administrative state.