She taught at Brown University, the University of California, Los Angeles, and Yale. The author of The Great Merger Movement in American Business, 1895-1904 and Insider Lending: Banks, Personal Connections, and Economic Development in Industrial New England, she has edited nine other books, and published numerous articles on business, economics, and financial history. She also co-edited the Journal of Economic History from 1992 to 1996.
Lamoreaux served as the Pitt Professor of American History and Institutions at the University of Cambridge in 2018-2019 and Sunderland Faculty Fellow at the University of Michigan Law School in 2020-2021. She has served as president of the Business History Conference and the Economic History Association and is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Cliometrics Society, and the Economic History Association.
She has been awarded the Alice Hanson Jones book prize; the Henrietta Larson, PEAES, and Arthur H. Cole article prizes; the Harold Williamson Prize for an outstanding business historian in midcareer; the Cliometrics award for exceptional support to that field; and the Business History Conference’s Lifetime Achievement Award.
Her current research interests include business organizational forms and contractual freedom in the US and Europe in the 19th and 20th centuries, the public/private distinction in US history, state constitutional changes mandating general laws in the 19th century US, and the US Patent Office as a site of learning in the administrative state.