Biography
Professor John Van Reenen is on part-time leave of absence, serving as Chair of the Council of Economic Advisers. He is the Ronald Coase Chair in Economics and School Professor Department of Economics at the London School of Economics and Digital Fellow, Initiative for the Digital Economy at the Massachusetts Institute for Technology (MIT). He was the Director of the Programme on Innovation and Diffusion (POID) (2020-2024). He was also the Director of Centre for Economic Performance, at LSE. Until 2020 he was Gordon Billard Professor in the MIT Economics Department and Sloan Management School. He has published more than 100 papers on many areas in economics with a particular focus on firm performance and the causes and consequences of innovation. He was the 2009 winner of the Yrjo Jahnsson Award (the European equivalent of the Clark Medal); the Arrow Prize (2011); the European Investment Bank Prize (2014), and the HBR-McKinsey Award (2018). He is a fellow of the British Academy, the Econometric Society, the NBER, CEPR and the Society of Labor Economists. In 2017, he was awarded an OBE for "services to public policy and economics" by the Queen.
Current areas of research include:
- POID is rooted in the argument that productivity growth rests ultimately upon two elements: innovation - ideas that are new to the world - and the diffusion of these ideas across the economy. Read More...