Below is a list of past research seminars hosted by POID featuring our academics and researchers at LSE.
Lent Term 2023
6 March 2023 - Emigration and Innovation: How industrial policy can affect the decision to emigrate
Speaker: Anna Rosso
Location: LSE (hybrid)
6 February 2023 - Does the Local Integration of Foreign Firms Matter? Theory and Cross-Country Evidence
Speaker: Isabela Manelici
Location: LSE (hybrid)
9 January 2023 - Strikes and Innovation: The Political Economy of Invention During the Industrial Revolution
Speaker: Jeremiah Dittmar
Location: LSE (hybrid)
Michaelmas Term 2022
5 December 2022 - The Hitchhiker's Guide to Markup Estimation
Speaker: Maarten de Ridder
Location: LSE (hybrid)
7 November 2022 - Spillovers from Science
Speaker: Arjun Shah
Location: LSE (hybrid)
Scientific knowledge creates value by serving as an input to technology development. Heterogeneity in the value created across disciplines, institutions, and regions may inform efficient targeting of science funding. This project proposes a method to rank scientific output by estimating the economic value of its knowledge spillovers to technology. We use the patent to paper citation network to assign a portion of the private returns from patented inventions as spillovers from scientific publications. The project also looks at the flow of spillovers across countries via academic fields, subfields and institutions. We aim to study the marginal returns to R & D spending on scientific output in terms of spillovers generated.
3 October 2022 - From Public Labs to Private Firms: Magnitude and Channels of R&D Spillovers
Speaker: Antonin Bergeaud
Location: LSE (hybrid)
Introducing a new measure of scientific proximity between private firms and public research groups and exploiting a multi-billion euro financing program of academic clusters in France, we provide causal evidence of spillovers from academic research to private sector firms. Firms in the top quartile of exposure to the funding shock increase their R&D effort by 20% compared to the bottom quartile. We exploit reports produced by funded clusters, complemented by data on labor mobility and R&D public-private partnerships, to provide evidence on the channels for these spillovers. We show that spillovers are driven by contracting between the private and public sectors and, to a lesser extent, by labor mobility from one to the other and by informal contacts. We discuss the policy implications of these findings.
5 September 2022 - Ray of Hope? China and the Rise of Solar
Speaker: Robin Burgess
Location: LSE (hybrid)
Solar energy prices are falling quickly and this source of energy is becoming a more important in countries across the world. Within China a range of policies have been implemented to encourage the solar industry. There is therefore an open question as to whether industrial policy in China has been successful in fostering innovation and growth in the solar industry. In this paper we examine whether city demand, supply and innovation subsidies lead to increased capacity, production and entry of solar firms. We also look at whether these different industrial policies are associated with an increase in solar patenting.
Summer Term 2022
4 July 2022 - Who wants to improve their management? Evidence from the MES
Speaker: Charlotte Meng
Location: LSE (hybrid)
6 June 2022 - Good rents versus bad rents: R&D misallocation and growth
Speaker: Philippe Aghion
Location: LSE (hybrid)
9 May 2022 - "BuMap" project, on the topic of Ukraine, the energy crisis and implications for business
Speaker: Ralf Martin
Location: LSE (hybrid)
Lent Term 2022
4 April 2022 - Who becomes an entrepreneur?
Speaker: Gaia Dossi
Location: LSE (online)
7 March 2022 - The New Wave? Technology Diffusion in the UK during the 2010s
Speaker: Viet Nguyen
Location: LSE (online)
7 February 2022 - The UK productivity puzzle - the role of declining responsiveness
Speaker: Richard Davies
Location: LSE (online)
10 January 2022 - AI-tocracy
Speaker: Noam Yuchtman
Location: LSE (online)
Michaelmas Term 2021
6 December 2021 - (Two Projects on) Sourcing Capabilities
Speaker: Rocco Macchiavello
Location: LSE (online)
1 November 2021 - The Impact of Labour Regulation on Innovation
Speaker: John Van Reenen
Location: LSE (online)
4 October 2021 - The business response to COVID-19: findings from the CEP-CBI survey on technology adoption, wave 2
Speaker: Anna Valero
Location: LSE (online)
6 September 2021 - Social Push and the Direction of Innovation
Speaker: Xavier Jaravel
Location: LSE (online)
Innovators' personal experience and social networks may affect their familiarity with customer needs, and in turn the types of products they bring to market. Consistent with this channel, we document that innovators create products that are more likely to be purchased by customers similar to them along observable dimensions including gender, age, and socio-economic status.
Summer Term 2021
5 July 2021 - Has aggregate productivity and pay decoupled the UK?
Speakers: Andreas Teichgraeber (and John Van Reenen)
Location: LSE (online)
This presentation analysed the growth of productivity and pay in the UK over the last 40 years. We showed that mean employee compensation and labour productivity have both almost doubled. However, when extending the analysis to the self-employed, we found a 60 percentage point difference in growth rates of employee and self-employed income between 1980 and 2019. This difference almost entirely explains the slight fall in the UK's labour share of GDP over that time period. If we further exclude non-wage compensation elements from the labour share, we found an even bigger fall (over five percentage points).
7 June 2021 - Globalization and market power
Speaker: Gianmario Impullitti
Location: LSE (online)
10 May 2021 - Supersize Me: intangibles and industry concentration
Speaker: Matej Bajgar (and Chiara Criscuolo)
Location: LSE (online)
The presentation offered new evidence on the growing scale of big businesses in the United States, Japan and 11 European countries since the early 2000s. The rising concentration is strongly associated with intensive investment in intangibles, particularly innovative assets, software and data, and this relationship is stronger in more globalised and digital-intensive industries.
21 April 2021 - Induced innovation, inventors, and the energy transition
Speaker: Eugene Dugoua
Location: LSE (online)
Reducing carbon emissions requires developing clean technologies, and thus, innovation plays a central role in dealing with climate change. Models of directed technical change show how tax and R&D subsidies can rapidly redirect scientists' research activities towards the clean sector.
Lent Term 2021
1 March 2021 - UK prices - a new firm-level data set
Speaker: Richard Davies
Location: LSE (online)
This presenation exposed a new dataset of 41 million UK consumer prices, providing facts on the frequency, size and timing of price changes between 1988 and 2020. The micro data are the 'price quotes' of individual consumer products that make up the official Consumer Prices Index (CPI) for the UK. Prices are recorded between January 1988 and December 2020 and cover a wide-ranging selection of items including food and drink, homewares, furniture and appliances, motoring supplies and fuels as well as a range of services.
1 February 2021 - The Empirics of 'Blitzscaling': technology and high-growth firms in the UK
Speakers: Mirko Draca (and Anna Valero)
Location: LSE (online)
11 January 2021 - The long-term productivity effects of working from home
Speaker: Jonathan Haskel
Location: LSE (online)
The COVID-19 pandemic caused a widespread decline in recorded GDP. Yet, as catastrophic as the collapse was, it was buffered by an unprecedented and spontaneous deployment of what we call "Potential Capital", the dwelling/residential capital and connective technologies that enabled some (fortunate) workers to work from home. We estimate the contribution of this capital, and the work from home that it facilitated, to have roughly halved the decline in GDP in the US reducing the fall in GDP to 9.4 percentage points in 2020Q2 at the trough of the recession. Turning to the future, changes in working from home depend upon relative costs, relative technologies and, crucially, the elasticity of substitution between home and work tasks. We estimate that that elasticity to be more than unity and suggest that the growth of ICT will raise the share of work done from home.
Michaelmas Term 2020
7 December 2020 - Competition and pass-through: evidence from the isolated markets
Speaker: Christos Genakos
Location: LSE (online)
This presentation demonstrated how pass-through varies with competition in isolated oligopolistic markets with captive consumers. Using daily pricing data from gas stations, we studied how unanticipated and exogenous changes in excise duties (which vary across different petroleum products) are passed through to consumers in markets with different numbers of retailers. We found that pass-through increased from 0.4 in monopoly markets to 1 in markets with four or more competitors and remained constant thereafter.
2 November 2020 - Industrial policy, clean growth and COVID-19
Speaker: Ralf Martin
Location: LSE (online)
5 October 2020 - Overview of POID work programme
Speaker: John Van Reenen
Location: LSE (online)