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The Programme on Innovation and Diffusion (POID) carries out cutting-edge research into how to improve productivity through nurturing innovation – ideas that are new to the world – and then diffusing these ideas across the economy
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Members of the panel will share insights on developments in their fields and provide input on key forecast issues, methods, and analysis. Read more...
John Van Reenen and Ufuk Akcigit assemble world-leading economists to consider how creative destruction can address today's most important political and social questions. Find out more...
The Programme on Innovation and Diffusion (POID) carries out cutting-edge research into how to improve productivity through nurturing innovation - ideas that are new to the world - and then diffusing these ideas across the economy. Read more...
The findings suggest that the UK policy should focus on the problem of chronic under-investment. Find out more...
Analysis of the UK's productivity problem points towards many contributing factors, discussed in this volume. Find out more...
We are seeking applied and empirical research papers in both the private and the public sector. Submission deadline: 20th September 2023, 11:59pm EST. Find out more...
In the long run, productivity growth is the most important determinant of material wellbeing. But the UK has now had 15 years of low productivity growth relative to its international peers and its own history. Find out more...
This biweekly podcast aims to generate easily accessible and engaging academic discussions on cutting edge research on innovation and diffusion. Read more...
EEE, IGC and POID convened the second Environment Week at the LSE on 11-14 September 2023 to encourage economists from all fields of economics to work on environmental issues and to connect this work to policy change. Read more....
Dr Anna Valero, fellow of the LSE and a member of the chancellor's economic advisory council. Anna: "… We are in the really precarious place where inflation is persisting but it looks as if it's coming down, the B... Read more...
02 November 2023
Workplaces have changed dramatically over the past four years, let alone the past 40. Teams have become more dispersed, thanks to remote work, as well as more diverse. Technology has brought with it great benefits but al... Read more...
26 October 2023
So I see the value of both routes. Today, the Resolution Foundation publishes companion papers by myself and Richard Layard on how to boost both routes into the jobs market. Read more at Conservative Home. Econom... Read more...
24 October 2023
In medicine, failure can be catastrophic. It can also produce discoveries that save millions of lives. On this episode of Freakonomics, John Van Reenen, Amy Edmondson, Carole Hemmelgarn, Gary Klein and Robert Langer shar... Read more...
18 October 2023
John van Reenen, a professor at the London School of Economics, has tracked the impact of managers since 2004. He says the first 18 years of his world management survey confirm a “significant link” between ma... Read more...
17 October 2023
Economist John van Reenen from the London School of Economics admits Labour’s policies may raise costs for employers but says the changes could also improve productivity, meaning companies will earn more per worker... Read more...
14 October 2023
The country's weak level of investment puts more weight on consumer spending, said John Van Reenen, a professor at the London School of Economics. “This becomes a 'doubly whammy' because "UK rates have risen more s... Read more...
12 October 2023
We tend to think of tragedies as a single terrible moment, rather than the result of multiple bad decisions. Can this pattern be reversed? We try — with stories about wildfires, school shootings, and love. Van Reen... Read more...
11 October 2023
"I think it's about time we see women taking up these really crucial roles. It's a shame the UK hasn't had a female chancellor in the past, Labour might inherit quite a tough ask of the mice and they because of the state... Read more...
09 October 2023
Small businesses are important drivers of economic growth, but they can face challenges accessing capital to fund research and development. Through the SBIR and STTR programs, agencies provide awards to small businesses ... Read more...
29 September 2023
Research and development "is by nature both creative and destructive", write economists Ufuk Akcigit and John Van Reenen. Read more at Nature ... Read more...
25 September 2023
We are delighted that Anna Valero will be taking over as CEP Growth Programme Director. Anna has a track record of highly regarded academic and policy work, she is Deputy Director of POID, and currently sits on the Chanc... Read more...
Debates about inequality often focus on inequalities between people. But what about inequalities between firms? Recent decades have seen the emergence of giant, multinational firms - the FAANGs of this world. But over 4... Read more...
30 August 2023
The real productivity problem starts at home. A significant factor is the poor quality of British managers, according to John Van Reenen and Nick Bloom, two economists who have conducted international surveys. Read more... Read more...
24 August 2023
A stellar cast of economists examines the roles of creative destruction in addressing today's most important political and social questions. Inequality is rising, growth is stagnant while rents accumulate, the environme... Read more...
22 August 2023
“Young firms are generally built by young people”, notes John Van Reenen of the London School of Economics. Between 1980 and 2020 the share of the American population aged between 20 and 35 fell from 26% to 2... Read more...
21 August 2023
Forecasting the global economy for next year is challenging. Economic growth in the US, China and Europe will be below potential in 2024, but I am hopeful that an outright recession can be avoided. It’s 55-45, thou... Read more...
14 August 2023
This is part of a vicious circle. Research on the management capabilities of 8,000 UK companies for a London School of Economics programme on how to boost productivity through innovation found that better managed compani... Read more...
25 July 2023
This is a decisive decade for addressing the UK’s longstanding productivity problems, large and persistent inequalities across and within regions, and delivering on net zero commitments. Anna Valero has contributed... Read more...
19 July 2023
That concentration has also risen in Europe, where competition authorities have not been as sleepy as in America, likewise suggests that powerful structural forces are at play. John Van Reenen of the London School of Eco... Read more...
12 July 2023
According to analysis by the Resolution Foundation think-tank, the amount of built-up land per capita in the UK has actually fallen since 2000 — in contrast to most other rich countries, including Germany, France a... Read more...
09 July 2023
John Van Reenen of the London School of Economics and Political Science notes that noncompetes are only one tool for driving innovation and entrepreneurship. ... Read more...
28 June 2023
I spoke to one of the authors Esin Serin, she's a policy analyst working on UK energy and climate policy at LSE's GRI centre. There are different types of tidal energy. Their report is about one type called tidal stream ... Read more...
Snippet: Professor John Van Reenen of the LSE on interest rate hikes Listen to the interview at LBC ... Read more...
22 June 2023
Scotland is leading the world in tidal stream renewable energy with more installed capacity than the rest of the planet combined, a new report from the London School of Economics has found. Read the Policy report, June 2... Read more...
21 June 2023
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We examine the levels and growth of UK productivity compared to France, Germany and the US. UK labour productivity is much lower than in other countries, and almost all of this gap is due to lower capital and skills rath...Read more...
John Van Reenen and Xuyi Yang
27 November 2023
The UK has experienced 15 years of poor productivity performance relative to its own past and relative to its peers. Analysis of the UK's productivity problem points towards many contributing factors, discussed in this v...Read more...
Anna Valero and Bart van Ark
The UK faces a productivity crisis and tackling this will be crucial to regaining sustainable increases in living standards. In response, the Autumn Statement announced a large number of measures to try and boost busines...Read more...
Anna Valero and John Van Reenen
23 November 2023
The price of renewables has fallen much faster than other sources of energy, making it a more accessible option for governments in low- and middle-income countries. In this episode of VoxDevTalks, Mar Reguant and John Va...Read more...
Mar Reguant and John Van Reenen
21 November 2023
An incredible coincidence: Lots of folks who don't like innovative, entrepreneurial market-technocapitalism ... think the only way to tackle climate change is to abandon innovative, entrepreneurial market-technocapitalis...Read more...
John Van Reenen
In this article, we consider the role of a modern industrial strategy - coordinating a range of `industrial policies' - in shaping such an approach. How can the UK, an open and service-based economy with a small domestic...Read more...
20 November 2023
Growth will be a key focus of the forthcoming Autumn Statement, which the Chancellor of the Exchequer will deliver this Wednesday. Anna Valero, Esin Serin and Brendan Curran argue that effective measures to promote green...Read more...
Brendan Curran, Esin Serin and Anna Valero
By automating non-routine tasks, AI may have a profound effect on the jobs we do, and even whether those jobs exist. How much should we fear, and how much should we welcome this change? In the second of our podcasts from...Read more...
13 November 2023
How do we measure innovation and compare it across countries? And how can it be that the UK is doing so well as an innovation nation, while we seem to be underperforming on productivity?...Read more...
Anna Valero, Sacha Wunsch-Vincent and Bart van Ark
9 November 2023
This week's King's Speech has paved the way for a further weakening of climate policy in the UK by introducing a bill to support future oil and gas drilling in the North Sea. Esin Serin and Anna Valero explain how this a...Read more...
Esin Serin and Anna Valero
8 November 2023
Following Bergeaud et al. (2022), we construct a new measure of proximity between industrial sectors and public research laboratories. Using this measure, we explore the underlying network of knowledge linkages between s...Read more...
Antonin Bergeaud and Arthur Guillouzouic
7 November 2023
A burgeoning literature in labor economics is focused on modelling employer labor market power, generally finding nontrivial estimates of monopsony power. A smaller literature also simultaneously incorporates product mar...Read more...
Tropical forests play a central role in slowing climate change and their conservation has become an international priority. The fact that the majority of tropical deforestation is illegal, often involves complicit states...Read more...
Robin Burgess, Francisco Costa and Benjamin Olken
3 November 2023
Falling off-grid solar prices and grid expansion now give many households in developing countries a choice between electricity sources. We experimentally estimate demand over all sources in Bihar, India and find that: (i...Read more...
Robin Burgess, Michael Greenstone, Nicholas Ryan and Anant Sudarshan
Steven Davis and Nick Bloom discuss the big shift to work from home, what it means for productivity, why perceptions in this regard often differ between managers and workers, and why - on balance - the big shift is a ble...Read more...
Nicholas Bloom and Steven J. Davis
2 November 2023
The rising dominance of large firms in many industrialised countries over the last few decades has received much attention, largely focusing on the potential negative effects of this increased market concentration. Using...Read more...
Mary Amiti, Cedric Duprez, Jozef Konings and John Van Reenen
31 October 2023
The UK Government has an opportunity to mobilise far greater amounts of private investment for public policy priorities than is the case now. Blended finance, deployed well, offers a tried and tested pathway for public a...Read more...
Sarah Gordon and Anna Valero
Investing in human capital is a crucial aspect of building an economy that is both more productive and fairer, and any growth strategy must incorporate an agenda for increasing human capital and workforce skills within t...Read more...
Rui Costa, Sandra McNally, Louise Murphy, Christopher A. Pissarides, Bertha Rohenkohl, Anna Valero and Guglielmo Ventura
The UK investment ecosystem needs rewiring across the board to increase firms' desire to invest in productive and sustainable assets, and to enhance their ability to do so. Paul Brandily, Mimosa Distefano, Krishan Shah, ...Read more...
Paul Brandily, Mimosa Distefano, Krishan Shah, Gregory Thwaites and Anna Valero
Social interactions determine many economic behaviors, but information on social ties does not exist in most publicly available and widely used datasets. We present results on the identification of social networks from o...Read more...
Imran Rasul, Pedro Souza and Aureo de Paula
How accurately does household income reflect the well-being of the individuals living within the household? Looking at household income does not take unequal consumption sharing within families, the value of time use (le...Read more...
Tim Obermeier
Mary Amiti, Cedric Duprez, Jozef Konings and John Van Reenen investigate whether large firms also generate positive effects. Using firm-to-firm transaction data for an industrialised country, Belgium, they find that larg...Read more...
Why do managers matter for firm performance? This paper provides evidence of the critical role of managers in matching workers to jobs within the firm using the universe of personnel records from a large multinational fi...Read more...
Virginia Minni
9 October 2023
Autocracies and weak democracies are more likely to import facial recognition AI from China, particularly in years when they experience domestic unrest, say Martin Beraja, Andrew Kao, David Yang and Noam Yuchtman....Read more...
Martin Beraja, Andrew Kao, David Y. Yang and Noam Yuchtman
It is generally difficult to measure the importance of preserving worker-firm relationships, particularly for low-wage jobs that involve general skills. The COVID-19 pandemic led to the sudden and seemingly temporary dis...Read more...
Morten Bennedsen, Birthe Larsen, Ian M. Schmutte and Daniela Scur
1 October 2023
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The UK economy is living with a toxic combination of 15 years of low growth and four decades of high inequality. The result is a country in relative decline, falling behind its peers, where taxes not wages are rising, an... Read more...
Various speakers , Anna Valero (CEP)
Monday 04 December 2023 09:30 - 16:00
In this paper we chart technological progress embodied in capital equipment used in production. To do this, we digitize archival statutory filings of 85 million transactions of capital equipment, across five large US St... Read more...
Peter Lambert (CEP, LSE), joint with Yannick Schindler (LSE, CfM)
Tuesday 05 December 2023 11:00 - 12:00
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Various speakers
Wednesday 13 December 2023 - Friday 15 December 2023
The public conversation around the workforce transition to Net Zero has become too narrowly focused on a small number of the greenest jobs. This binary narrative fails to capture the complexity of the changing labour mar... Read more...
Liz Gallagher (NESTA), India Kerle (NESTA), Zayn Meghji (NESTA)
Tuesday 19 December 2023 11:00 - 12:00
Capucine Riom (LSE)
Tuesday 09 January 2024 11:00 - 12:00
Mirabelle Muuls (Imperial College London and LSE)
Tuesday 16 January 2024 11:00 - 12:00
Rachel Griffith (University of Manchester and Institute for Fiscal Studies)
Tuesday 06 February 2024 11:00 - 12:00
Dave Donaldson (Massachusetts Institute of Technology)
Tuesday 05 March 2024 11:00 - 12:00
Ramana Nanda (Harvard Business School)
Tuesday 09 April 2024 11:00 - 12:00
Richard Davies (Economic & Social Research Council and CEP)
Tuesday 07 May 2024 11:00 - 12:00
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