The first of these came early in the form of pioneering work on transfer pricing by multinational enterprises, based especially on an empirical investigation of corporations operating in the pharmaceutical industry.
This was accompanied by extensive work on the role of foreign investment and multinationals in developing economies, done in part in collaboration with one of his early mentors, Paul Streeten.
Lall's fascination with India and the Indian economy led to his opening up a related, highly significant field of work - the phenomenon of Third World multinationals, and developing countries as the exporters of technology.
Lall's empirical work carefully scrutinised the validity of the ubiquitous assertions that unrestricted flows of foreign direct investment (FDI) through multinationals would lead to effective technology transfer into the manufacturing sectors of developing economies.
Lall tends seriously to question the automaticity of any such benefit transfer; he shows, however, the relevance of an active state policy vis-à-vis the domestic manufacturing and technology sectors.
It has been held by the following scholars: 2011: Robert Wade 2013: Dani Rodrik 2014: Paul Krugman 2015: Abhijit Banerjee 2016: Avinash Dixit 2017: Kenneth Rogoff 2018: Esther Duflo 2022: Joseph Stiglitz 2023: Raj Chetty 2024: Daron Acemoglu The Visiting Professorship, which is associated with the Social Sciences Division and Green Templeton College, was launched on 3 June 2011.
The inaugural event was a panel discussion involving Nobel Laureate Amartya Sen, Financial Times commentator Martin Wolf, and the first holder of the new Chair, Robert Wade of the London School of Economics.
[4] Professor Sen highlighted the considerable pressures Western democracies face from powerful banking institutions, and the lessons to be learned from emerging markets with more robust regulatory systems.