Kenneth Sokoloff

Kenneth Lee Sokoloff (July 27, 1952 – May 21, 2007) was an American economic historian who was broadly interested in the interaction between initial factor endowments, institutions, and economic growth. He joined the faculty at the University of California, Los Angeles in 1980 where he spent the remainder of his career. He died of liver cancer in Los Angeles, California on May 21, 2007.

Kenneth grew up in Silver Spring, Maryland. He had a bone disease that was kept in submission by very expensive medications and transfusions, eventually leading to liver cancer and death. Despite his infirmity, he had an active and full life. His father was a famous scientist, Louis Sokoloff, who did pioneering work in brain metabolism, which led to the invention of PET scans.

Academic Work

In a series of influential papers coauthored with Stanley Engerman, Sokoloff studied the impact of countries' initial factor endowments on their later political and economic development. and of New World countries can be explained through differences in initial endowments of factors including human capital and levels of inequality. Moreover, Sokoloff and Engerman theorized that initial levels of wealth and political power inequality led to the development of institutions that perpetuated these inequalities, furthering their deleterious impact on long run economic growth. On the other hand, Sokoloff, with Naomi Lamoreaux, found that over time the capital requirements associated with invention became prohibitively high, leading to firms taking over much of the innovative activity that was previously undertaken by individual entrepreneurs.