Richard Langlois

Faculty Excellence in Research, Humanities/Social Sciences 2007

Department of Economics, College of Liberal Arts & Sciences
Nominated by: Kathleen Segerson

Richard Langlois is Professor of Economics and Director of Undergraduate Studies in the Department of Economics. He was educated at Williams, Yale, and Stanford. Before coming to UConn in 1983, he was affiliated with the Center for Science and Technology Policy and the C. V. Starr Center for Applied Economics at New York University.

Richard’s principal research area is the economics of organization. He is the author (with Paul L. Robertson) of Firms, Markets, and Economic Change: A Dynamic Theory of Business Institutions (London: Routledge, 1995), which articulates (among other things) the theory of dynamic transaction costs and the theory of modular technological systems. Another focus of his work has been the economic history of technology. He has written on such industries as computers, semiconductors, semiconductor manufacturing equipment, and software. His history of the microcomputer industry won the Newcomen Award as the best article in Business History Review in 1992.

Recently, Richard has turned his attention to explaining the changes in corporate organization in the late twentieth century, a set of phenomena he refers to as the Vanishing Hand. His latest book, The Dynamics of Industrial Capitalism: Schumpeter, Chandler, and the New Economy (Routledge, 2007), was co-recipient of the 2006 Schumpeter Prize of the International Joseph A. Schumpeter Society. Also in 2006, Professor Langlois received a Provost’s Research Excellence award from the University of Connecticut.

Updated: 2007