Lawrence King

Lawrence King (Ph.D., Sociology, University of California, Los Angeles 1997) is Professor of Economics at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. He previously was an Assistant and Associate Professor of Sociology at Yale University, and Professor of Sociology and Political Economy at the University of Cambridge. He has written extensively on the transition to capitalism in Eastern Europe, focusing on privatization and foreign investment.

More recently he has investigated a diverse set of topics in the political economy of public health, a multidisciplinary project that has the goal of bringing together the types of variables, analyses and methods used in comparative political economy with public health research. Examples of this project include the effect of radical privatization programs on the postcommunist mortality crisis, the impact of IMF conditionalities in shaping health systems in Sub-Saharan Africa, the role of financialization on drug innovation and pricing, and the influence of deindustrialization and incarceration in shaping health inequalities in the U.S.

He has published more than 70 articles in various journals, including The Lancet, BMJ, P.N.A.S., PLoSMED, JAMA, Social Science and Medicine, American Journal of Sociology, American Review of Sociology, and World Development.