Lawrence King

About

Lawrence King is a professor in the Department of Economics at UMass Amherst with a distinguished background in sociology and political economy. He earned his Ph.D. and M.A. in Sociology from the University of California, Los Angeles, and his B.A. in Political Science from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. His research interests encompass comparative political economy, the political economy of health, development, comparative historical sociology, post-communist transition, methodology, theory, complex organizations, and industrial organization. He has held prominent editorial roles, including co-editor and associate editor of the Cambridge Journal of Economics, and serves on the editorial board of EMECON. King has been involved in various academic leadership positions, such as Director of Graduate Studies at the University of Cambridge's Department of Sociology and chair of the Research/REF Committee. His work has been supported by numerous grants from prestigious institutions, and he has received awards including the American Sociological Association Economic Sociology Section's Granovettor Best Paper Prize. King's research has significantly contributed to understanding the social determinants of health, the impact of international financial institutions like the IMF on socio-economic development and health outcomes, and the political economy of structural adjustment and privatization. His publications address issues such as health policy, corruption, globalization,…

Research topics

• Sociology
• Economics
• Medicine
• Demography
• Development economics
• Social Science
• Political Science
• Environmental health
• Political economy
• Criminology

Selected publications

• Deaths of Despair in Comparative Perspective

  Annual Review of Sociology · 2022 · 100 citations

  1st authorCorresponding

  A socially patterned epidemic of deaths of despair is a signal feature of American society in the twenty-first century, involving rising mortality from substance use disorders and self-harm at the bottom of the class structure. In the present review, we compare this population health crisis to that which ravaged Eastern Europe at the tail end of the previous century. We chart their common upstream causes: violent social dislocations wrought by rapid economic change and attendant public policies.…

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Incarceration and mortality in the United States

  SSM - Population Health · 2021 · 30 citations

  Senior authorCorresponding

  The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic has spotlighted the role of America's overcrowded prisons as vectors of ill health, but robust analyses of the degree to which high rates of incarceration impact population-level health outcomes remain scarce. In this paper, we use county-level panel data from 2927 counties across 43 states between 1983 and 2014 and a novel instrumental variable technique to study the causal effect of penal expansion on age-standardised cause-specific and all-cause mortality rates.…

  PublisherDOI

• Deindustrialization, social disintegration, and health: a neoclassical sociological approach

  Theory and Society · 2022-03-14 · 28 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  Abstract Deindustrialization is a major burden on workers’ health in many countries, calling for theoretically informed sociological analysis. Here, we present a novel neoclassical sociological synthesis of the lived experience of deindustrialization. We conceptualize industry as a social institution whose disintegration has widespread implications for the social fabric. Combining Durkheimian and Marxian categories, we show that deindustrialization generates ruptures in economic production, whic…

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Structural adjustment programmes and infectious disease mortality

  medRxiv (Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory) · 2021 · 25 citations

  Senior authorCorresponding

  International financial organisations like the International Monetary Fund (IMF) play a central role in shaping the developmental trajectories of fiscally distressed countries through their conditional lending schemes, known as ‘structural adjustment programmes’. These programmes entail wide-ranging domestic policy reforms that influence local health and welfare systems. Using novel panel data from 187 countries between 1990 and 2017 and an instrumental variable technique, we find that IMF progr…

  DOI

• Deindustrialisation and the post-socialist mortality crisis

  Cambridge Journal of Economics · 2023-03-01 · 14 citations

  articleSenior author

  Abstract An unprecedented mortality crisis struck Eastern Europe during the 1990s, causing around seven million excess deaths. We enter the debate about the causes of this crisis by performing the first quantitative analysis of the association between deindustrialisation and mortality in Eastern Europe. We develop a theoretical framework identifying deindustrialisation as a process of social disintegration rooted in the lived experience of shock therapy. We test this theory relying on a novel mu…

  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Martin McKee

  London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine

  47 shared

• Thomas Stubbs

  Royal Holloway University of London

  45 shared

• Alexander Kentikelenis

  Bocconi University

  43 shared

• David Stuckler

  Bocconi University

  41 shared

• Bernhard Reinsberg

  University of Glasgow

  27 shared

• Mihály Fazekas

  Central European University

  21 shared

• Darja Irdam

  17 shared

• Gábor Scheiring

  17 shared

Education

• Ph.D Sociology

  University of Southern California

  1997

• M.A. Sociology

  University of Southern California

  1992

• B.A. Political Science

  University of Michigan

  1989

Awards & honors

• Winner of American Sociological Association Economic Sociolo…
• ESRC Impact Accelerator Award, 2016

Similar researchers at University of Massachusetts Amherst

• Juan-Camilo Cárdenash-41
• Gerald Epsteinh-31
• Jayati Ghoshh-28