Dr. Richard Langlois

Bio

Richard N. Langlois is Professor of Economics at the University of Connecticut. A native of northeastern Connecticut, he was educated at Williams, Yale, and Stanford. He has been a visiting Senior Fellow at the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania; an Adjunct (Honorary) Professorship at the Copenhagen Business School; and a Distinguished Professor in the School of Economics and Business Sciences, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa.

Professor Langlois’s principal research is the economics of organizations and institutions. He is the author (with Paul L. Robertson) of Firms, Markets, and Economic Change: A Dynamic Theory of Business Institutions (Routledge, 1995), which articulates (among other things) the theory of dynamic transaction costs and the theory of modular technological systems. Another focus of Professor Langlois’s 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, Professor Langlois 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), received the 2006 Schumpeter Prize of the International Joseph A. Schumpeter Society. He is currently at work on a major book project called The Corporation and the Twentieth Century.

Professor Langlois received the Provost’s Research Excellence Award from the University of Connecticut (2006); the Faculty Excellence Award in Research (Humanities/Social Sciences) from the University of Connecticut Alumni Association (2007); and the Research Excellence Award (Social Sciences) from the UConn College of Liberal Arts and Sciences (2015). He is a founding co-editor of the Journal of Institutional Economics (Cambridge University Press) and was named a founding Honorary President of the World Interdisciplinary Network for Institutional Research (2013).