By Andrew Thurston

Loan sharks and drug dealers. Not two professions you’d expect a labor economist to be scrutinizing, but Kevin Lang’s research has long swerved into the unexpected to reveal new insights into human behavior and interactions.

“When I decided I would do a master’s degree, I literally wrote ‘sociology,’ then crossed it out and put ‘economics’,” says Lang, a professor of economics who joined CAS in 1987. “I’ve always been interested in questions at the interstices of sociology and economics.”

In forthcoming papers, Lang will review 11,000 loan shark payouts to examine deal enforcement and look through the murky accounting books of low-level drug dealers to understand their labor practices. He’ll also publish results from projects grounded in more familiar economics territory, including the impact of skills investment on job movement and racial discrimination on employment.

“I like to work on a lot of different things,” says Lang, who also edits the Journal of Labor Economics and heads the Society of Labor Economists.

In summer 2021, Lang’s diverse efforts were given a significant boost when he was named the inaugural Laurence A. Bloom Professor of Economics. The endowed chair, which includes funding support, was made possible by a gift from Bloom (DGE’66, CAS’68), an economics alum and accomplished stock trader. Lang says having a named chair will allow him to further expand the scope of his research and hire a full-time research assistant.

Bloom, who spent his career with Bristol-Myers Squibb, left $8.25 million to BU when he died in 2019. His donation also supported the founding of a need-based undergraduate scholarship, a humanities and social sciences Ph.D. fellowship fund, and a portion of the Wetherill-Bloom Career Development Professorship in the Humanities.

“Endowed professorships are crucial in recognizing and supporting our most outstanding faculty scholars and teachers,” says Stan Sclaroff, dean of CAS. “Having the world’s leading scholars and researchers at Boston University brings great energy and inspiration to our students, both in classes with these faculty and in mentoring.”

The college recently confirmed a number of other endowed appointments, naming Nina Silber the Jon Westling Professor of History and Donna Pincus, a member of the psychological and brain sciences faculty, the Feld Family Professor of Teaching Excellence; Kate Lindsey, an assistant professor of linguistics, was awarded the Wetherill-Bloom Professorship.

Because named professorships carry a certain prestige in the academic world, Sclaroff says, they bolster the reputation of a scholar and their institution. In many fields, including economics, that cachet and the promise of increased funding are important faculty recruitment tools, helping attract the best candidates.

“Our peer and peer plus institutions—institutions that have many more endowed professorships to offer faculty than we do at the moment—often try to ‘poach’ our faculty,” says Sclaroff. “In such a competitive market, establishing more endowed professorships, like the Laurence A. Bloom Professorship, will be absolutely critical.”

And the benefits of an endowment only increase with time.

“The value of the endowment grows,” says Lang, who led the economics department from 2005 to 2009. “The funding support that I currently get is helpful, but 60 or 100 years from now, it’s going to be a big amount, which can give somebody a tremendous amount of research support and will enable the University to hire somebody and promote their research in a way that is very challenging to do otherwise.”

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