William Lazonick (born June 8, 1945) is an economist who studies innovation and competition in the global economy. Lazonick's research seeks to understand how, on the basis of innovative enterprise, a national economy can achieve stable and equitable economic growth. Lazonick is the originator of "the theory of innovative enterprise", which, he argues, provides both an essential intellectual foundation for understanding economic performance and a fundamental critique of the neoclassical theory of the market economy. Much of his current work focuses on how the financialization of the U.S. industrial corporation, manifested in massive distributions of corporate cash to shareholders and the explosion of stock-based executive pay, results in employment instability and income inequality, while undermining the innovative capability of the U.S. economy. Lazonick also conducts cross-national comparative research on the social conditions that enable or proscribe innovative enterprise, focusing in particular on the economies of Britain, Japan, and China as well as the United States. Early life Lazonick was born in Toronto, Canada on June 8, 1945. Lazonick was an undergraduate in Commerce and Finance at the University of Toronto, receiving a Bachelor of Commerce degree in 1968. He then attended the London School of Economics, where he was awarded a Master of Science (Economics) degree, with a Mark of Distinction, in 1969. Lazonick spent one year as a graduate student at the Graduate Institute of International Studies in Geneva before entering the PhD program in economics at Harvard University in 1970. For his doctoral thesis, he studied the applicability of Karl Marx's theory of capitalist development to the British Industrial Revolution, the experience that formed the empirical basis for Marx's arguments. Career Educational Appointments In 1975 Lazonick was hired as an assistant professor in the Harvard Economics Department, where he taught comparative economic development, economic history, and the history of economic analysis, all from a perspective that was critical of neoclassical economics. In 1980 he was promoted to associate professor of economics. In 1982-83 he was a visiting professor of economics at the University of Toronto. In 1984-85 Lazonick held the Harvard-Newcomen Fellowship in Business History at Harvard Business School (HBS) and became an initial member of the HBS "Business History Group", working with Alfred D. Chandler, Jr. He remained as a research fellow at HBS in 1985–86 with funding from the German Marshall Fund of the United States and the National Science Foundation. In 1985 Lazonick was appointed