Naomi R. Lamoreaux is Professor of Economics and History at Yale University, a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research, and a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She received her Ph.D. in history from The Johns Hopkins University in 1979 and then taught at Brown University from 1979 to 1996 and the University of California, Los Angeles from 1996 to 2010. 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 several other books, and published many articles on business, economic, and financial history. Her current research interests include patenting and the market for technology in the late nineteenth and twentieth century U.S., business organizational forms and contractual freedom in the U.S. and Europe and in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the public/private distinction in U.S. history, and the rise and decline of innovative regions.