Article content continued

But the rising tide of repurchases in the U.S. has now inspired critics in Congress and on the presidential campaign trail who have drawn on Lazonick’s work. So much so, The New Yorker recently dubbed him as “The Economist Who Put Stock Buybacks in Washington’s Crosshairs.”

For example, Democratic Senator Tammy Baldwin released a staff report in March blasting buybacks for suppressing wages, driving inequality and decreasing investment. It was acknowledged the report “would not be possible without the help of William Lazonick,” among others.

Photo by Alex Wong/Getty Images files

The pushback has mostly come from Democrats, including presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren, but a recent report by Republican Senator Marco Rubio questioned the theory that drives businesses to obsess over returning value to shareholders, saying it is, “as William Lazonick has called it, an ideology.”

Such criticism has yet to take off in the same way in Lazonick’s native land. Notwithstanding a stay in Montreal in the late 1980s, the academic says he has mostly lived in the U.S. since graduating from the University of Toronto in 1968.

Lazonick spent time teaching at Harvard University, and is currently an emeritus professor at the University of Massachusetts Lowell and president of the not-for-profit Academic-Industry Research Network. According to him, there has not been the same kind of debate about buybacks in Canada.

“I haven’t really seen much,” he said.