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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
The Power of Creative Destruction has been chosen by The Economist as one of its best books of 2021.The book, by Philippe Aghion, Céline Antonin and Simon Bunel, is described by the magazine as "sweeping, aut... Read more...
17 December 2021
A Wharton Research Data Services (WRDS) best paper award has been given to John Van Reenen, director of the Programme on Innovation and Diffusion (POID), and his co-authors Sabrina T. Howell, of New York Unive... Read more...
27 September 2021
Research by Capucine Riom and Anna Valero finds the Covid-19 pandemic has forced businesses to adopt new technologies and ways of working that will increase the breadth of economic productivity. ... Read more...
08 February 2021
More than 900,000 small businesses are at risk of going under, according to research from Peter Lambert and John Van Reenen, and backed by former Prime Minister Gordon Brown. ... Read more...
27 January 2021
Research by Peter Lambert and John Van Reenen warns around 900,000 small firms – employing 2.5 million workers – are at risk of going bust if Covid-19 rescue schemes are wound up. ... Read more...
Gordon Brown has called for emergency measures to support businesses in the budget after new research by Peter Lambert and John Van Reenen warned almost 1m UK companies were at risk of failure in the next thre... Read more...
A multi-million-pound research programme to help boost UK productivity is to be led by Professor John Van Reenen, associate and former director of the Centre for Economic Performance. The Programme on Innov... Read more...
21 August 2020
The assumption has been that remote workers slack without direct supervision. But do they? Economist Nick Bloom staged a trial – the first of its kind – involving 250 members of a Ctrip call cen... Read more...
14 July 2020
There's an opportunity to build a new social contract, tackle inequality, foster innovation and adopt a long-term industrial strategy, write Sam Unsworth and Anna Valero. ... Read more...
18 May 2020
Even in more advanced countries, national statistics have proved inadequate in recording informal workers outside the organised sector, especially the new breed of self-employed and temporary workers in cities... Read more...
05 May 2020
Yet, as it turns out, this economic theory might not hold. A new working paper by Enrico Moretti, John Van Reenen, , Claudia Steinwender, from the economics departments of the University of California, Berkeley and MIT,... Read more...
02 December 2019
Max Nathan is an associate professor at the Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis, University College London. London's technology ecosystem is thriving. The city has more than 50,000 tech firms, with over 260,000 employe... Read more...
29 October 2019
If that isn't compelling enough, here is some evidence. In a recent article, Alex Bell, Raj Chetty, Xavier Jaravel, Neviana Petkova and John van Reenan found that higher taxes on the wealthy would not cause a reduction i... Read more...
27 October 2019
Every city wants a cluster, a concentration of high-productivity firms and workers beavering away in a particular industry in a particular place. Proximity means ideas and productivity growing and spreading. Who doesn't ... Read more...
20 October 2019
Congratulations to Benjamin Moll and Xavier Jaravel, who are both winners of this year's Philip Leverhulme Prizes.... Read more...
17 October 2019
Meanwhile, some studies suggest that research productivity is slowing down, so that it takes more scientists to glean each new insight across a variety of fields. Fighting this slowdown is a worthy goal, but a difficult... Read more...
03 October 2019
A new data set helps address the lack of innovation data able to capture firms' internal mechanisms and behaviours, write Max Nathan and Anna Cecilia Rosso. What Works Well Centre for Economic Growth... Read more...
02 October 2019
Lisa Cook, Michigan State University Economics Professor references Opportunity Insights' Who Becomes an Inventor in America? The Importance of Exposure to Innovation by Alex Bell, Raj Chetty, Xavier Jaravel, Neviana Pet... Read more...
24 September 2019
A new paper by economists Nicholas Bloom, John Van Reenen and Heidi Williams canvasses the principal policies that governments have used to nurture innovation. A Toolkit of Policies to Promote Innovation, Nicholas Bloom... Read more...
20 September 2019
In a recent study, Ana Valero and John van Reenen tell us how much the economic benefits of the presence of a university in the region amount to by studying 15 thousand universities located in 1,500 different regions in ... Read more...
26 August 2019
"This plays out over and over, at every scale and within every state," says Muro. And while major coastal metros may attract a higher concentration of elite firms and global talent, midsize cities with universities benef... Read more...
22 August 2019
A recent article in the Journal of Economic Perspectives by Nicholas Bloom, John Van Reenen, and Heidi Williams examines the productivity slowdown and innovation policy. They note that in 2015 the United States spent the... Read more...
16 August 2019
Economists Nicholas Bloom, John Van Reenen and Heidi Williams have a new paper outlining possible ways to make that happen. They conclude that there are three policies that are fairly effective at spurring economically b... Read more...
09 August 2019
Of course, the relationship between R&D spending and broader technological progress is complicated. Translating research discoveries into goods and services isn't a simple or mechanical process. Other important elements ... Read more...
07 August 2019
Role models matter for innovation too. Research from economists Raj Chetty and John Van Reenen studied the lives of over a million inventors in the US. Using a database that linked patent records to local tax and school ... Read more...
17 July 2019
John Van Reenen, MIT, discusses work he has done on how 'superstar firms' such as Google and Apple have changed the global economy. The superstars, although big, employ relatively few workers and this has contributed to ... Read more...
16 July 2019
In this sense, one of the most complete studies to date was carried out by the economists Georg Graetz and Guy Michaels, of Uppsala University and the London School of Economics (in Robots at Work, The Review of Economic... Read more...
20 May 2019
Dr Anna Valero, innovation fellow at the London School of Economics, said the results of the funding would inform local and national governments to improve access to technology.... Read more...
06 May 2019
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01 May 2019
Economists David Autor, David Dorn, Lawrence Katz, Christina Patterson and John Van Reenen, who wrote one of the first papers to bring attention to the phenomenon of rising concentration, also endorse a story of so-calle... Read more...
26 April 2019
In a new CEP Discussion Paper, "Affordability, Financial Innovation and the Start of the Housing Boom" my coauthors and I study the relationship between the start of the housing boom and the use of non-traditional mortga... Read more...
There is growing concern that human jobs are being replaced by the rapid technological progress of artificial intelligence (AI), robotics, and automation (Acemoglu and Restrepo 2017, Brynjolfsson and McAfee 2014, Ford 20... Read more...
14 April 2019
Robots are already driving productivity. Investment in robots contributed to 10 percent of GDP growth per capita in Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) countries from 1993 to 2016.5 There is also... Read more...
08 April 2019
Robots increase productivity when used for tasks that perform more efficiently and at a higher and more stable level of quality than people. In a research focused on robotics for the Center for Economic Performance at th... Read more...
05 April 2019
Johannes Gutenberg died in 1468, a little over a decade after inventing movable type. But he had already set in motion a gold rush-like frenzy of European entrepreneurs who flung open print shops to cash in on his techno... Read more...
28 March 2019
In 2010, along with two other colleagues at MIT and the University of California at San Diego, he had already observed that the productivity of former star coworkers decreased by 5% to 8% after such a fatal event. "Since... Read more...
27 March 2019
However, the phenomenon that has promoted the economic viability of new technology around the world has been the reduction of prices. According to Graetz and Michaels [5], the price of industrial robots has been reduced ... Read more...
26 March 2019
However, women inventors made up only 12% of all inventors on patents granted in 2016 - the most recent year for which data is available - according to the patent office. That disparity is not a good sign and even hurts... Read more...
In a similar spirit, I of course know that the introduction of a printing press with moveable type by to Europe in 1439 by Johannes Gutenberg is often called one of the most important inventions in world history. However... Read more...
22 March 2019
Donald Trump has cited the example of one of his US presidential predecessors, Ronald Reagan, in support of his protectionist policies. But as research by Ufuk Akcigit, Sina Ates and Giammario Impullitti shows, it was th... Read more...
19 March 2019
Book prices fell, the salaries of university professors rose, and revolutionary religious ideas spread, write Jeremiah Dittmar and Skipper Seabold.... Read more...
14 March 2019
Arguably, it is also simply getting harder to innovate. As economists Nick Bloom, Chad Jones, John Van Reenen and Michael Webb argue, .... ... Read more...
10 March 2019
09 March 2019
Phlippe Aghion (College of France, LSE, and CEPR) discusses work on merged datasets from the UK - one detailing occupation & wages, the other looking at R&D and investment. ... Read more...
04 March 2019
The UK needs a new era of policy activism with a 'future of good work' focus, write Christopher Pissarides, Anna Thomas and Josh De Lyon.... Read more...
06 February 2019
"Lessons from this RCT will provide valuable insight into the most (a) effective and (b) cost-effective means of driving adoption of AI; whether education and convening is sufficient to drive adoption or whether a degree... Read more...
29 January 2019
Innovation is widely viewed as the engine of economic growth. To maximize innovation and growth, all of our brightest youth should have the opportunity to become inventors. But a study we recently conducted, jointly wit... Read more...
21 November 2018
There is a rise of an innovative elite that is an engine of efficiency. Its members are companies that have mastered digital technologies and enjoy network effects that help them fend off slower competitors, says John Va... Read more...
15 November 2018
John Van Reenen comments on whether executives in many industries are sold on the technical revolution. "There is a big debate on whether robots are really delivering on the productivity benefits they might promise." ... Read more...
09 November 2018
Left-behind places are lending themselves increasingly to the forces of populism and political disintegration, writes Riccardo Crescenzi. A complex flow of investment is spreading across the globe, connecting more a... Read more...
07 November 2018
09 July 2018
Proximity to a large plant plays an important role in the diffusion of knowledge and patent production, write Vincenzo Scrutinio, Christian Fons-Rosen and Katalin Szemeredi. ... Read more...
30 June 2018
Research productivity – measured by number of papers produced per head of population – also correlates reasonably strongly with economic development measures. So do enrolment levels in tertiary edu... Read more...
31 May 2018
As part of a larger ongoing study of inequality in America, researchers used patent data to focus on innovation. Among their findings, children from high-income families are 10 times as likely to become invent... Read more...
30 May 2018
SWINDON, United Kingdom – The Economic and Social Research Council(ESRC) has announced that the Centre for Economic Performance (CEP), the Enterprise Research Centre (ERC), the What Works Centre for Loca... Read more...
16 April 2018
The Economic and Social Research Council is delighted to announce that the Centre for Economic Performance (CEP), the Enterprise Research Centre (ERC), the What Works Centre for Local Economic Growth Centre (L... Read more...
Today for the first time, the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) is to recognise its global centres of excellence with official ESRC Research Institute status. The move acknowledg... Read more...
09 April 2018
22 March 2018
Snippet: ...tests in the third year of primary school are many times more likely than the other 95% to file patents in later life. But the likelihood is still much greater among smart kids from rich families. ... Read more...
In a paper he signed with John Van Reenen, Neviana Petkova, Xavier Jaravel and Alex Bell it was discovered that people with parents who are among the richest 1% of the United States are ten times more likely t... Read more...
14 February 2018
Article by by Xavier Jaravel, Raj Chetty, John Van Reenen and Alexander Bell A new analysis shows how much the socioeconomic status of a student's family influences whether he becomes an inventor a... Read more...
11 February 2018
...Our first finding is that there are large differences in innovation rates by socioeconomic class, race and gender. Using new de-identified data that allows us to track 1.2 million inventors from birth to ad... Read more...
25 January 2018
24 January 2018
Article by Xavier Jaravel, Raj Chetty, John Van Reenen and Alexander Bell A new analysis shows how family background influences who grows up to invent. The key to turning things around? Expose kids to more ... Read more...
One of the researchers, John Van Reenen, a professor of management and economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, told this reporter that the study found that the childhood environment was a key f... Read more...
22 January 2018
Economist John Van Reenen studies the creation and use of technology, from the R&D lab to the workplace Long before John Van Reenen became a professor at MIT, he was studying MIT topics in an MIT style.... Read more...
08 January 2018
While there could be many factors hobbling innovation, findings of a recent study by Alex Bell, Raj Chetty, Xavier Jaravel, Neviana Petkova, and John Van Reenen—who are associated with various American i... Read more...
29 December 2017
It is no secret that innovation is a powerful driver of growth in any modern economy. How does a country promote innovation activity? A recent study by economists Alex Bell, Raj Chetty, Xavier Jaravel, Neviana... Read more...
25 December 2017
24 December 2017
Article by Alex Bell, Raj Chetty, Xavier Jaravel, Neviana Petkova and John Van Reenen: Relatively little is known about the factors that induce people to become inventors. Using data on the lives of over... Read more...
By obtaining highly detailed data on more than one million American inventors, a recent study by Alex Bell (Harvard University), Raj Chetty (Stanford University), Xavier Jaravel (London School of Economics), N... Read more...
23 December 2017
How about the notion that smarts determine life success? That idea too has come under assault from recent research. A recent paper by economists Alex Bell, Raj Chetty, Xavier Jaravel, Neviana Petkova, and John... Read more...
16 December 2017
05 December 2017
04 December 2017
The study, undertaken by Chetty along with Alex Ball of Harvard, Xavier Jaravel of the London School of Economics, Neviana Petkova of the US Treasury, and John Van Reenen of MIT, is unique due to its ability ... Read more...
03 December 2017
Other research confirms that the beneficial effect of universities isn't just correlation. A 2015 paper by economist Shimeng Liu found that areas where the U.S. federal government made land grants to unive... Read more...
14 November 2017
Article by Christian Helmers and Henry Overman Big scientific research facilities like the UK’s Diamond Light Source, a third generation synchrotron (circular particle accelerator), benefit scien... Read more...
07 November 2017
R&D tax relief encourages investment in research and development across the economy, according to a recently published study by the London School of Economics (LSE). Researchers from the LSE’s Centre... Read more...
02 October 2017
But the exploitation of currently available knowledge is far from complete A recent paper by Nicholas Bloom, Charles Jones and Michael Webb of Stanford University, and John Van Reenen of the Massachusetts I... Read more...
29 September 2017
21 September 2017
Article by Nicholas Bloom, Charles I. Jones, John Van Reenen and Michael Webb: The rate of productivity growth in advanced economies has been falling. Optimists hope for a fourth industrial revolution, while p... Read more...
20 September 2017
Article by Max Nathan: ...Our latest case study summarises Innovate UK's programmes of support for microbusinesses and SMEs: mainly grants but also loans, awarded on a competitive basis, either to in... Read more...
17 August 2017
Article by Philippe Aghion, Antonin Bergeaud, Timo Boppart, Peter Klenow, Huiyu Li Slowing growth of total factor productivity has led some to suggest that the world is running out of ideas for innova... Read more...
16 August 2017
At the G7delle University, which took place recently in Udine, "I talked about the role of universities – concluded sun-in the development of the economic revival of the internal areas, as demonstra... Read more...
06 July 2017
All of the UK’s main political parties now highlight the importance of an ‘industrial strategy’ with the aim of improving economic growth and achieving more balance in how its gains are distr... Read more...
30 May 2017
17 May 2017
Article by Nicholas Bloom, Erik Brynjolfsson, Megha Patnaik, Itay Saporta-Eksten and John Van Reenen Our analysis of the Census data, conducted with Lucia Foster and Ron Jarmin of the U.S. Census Bureau and... Read more...
18 April 2017
Yatang Lin, a researcher from the Centre for Economic Performance of the London School of Economics, enthused that "there were ambitions to get everything done pretty quickly. Of course, there were politi... Read more...
04 March 2017
Dr Hilary Steedman, senior research fellow at The London School of Economics, speaking on the BBC’s Today programme, said: “I think the IFS has really overstated their case here. We have a really s... Read more...
31 January 2017
Britain’s manufacturing heritage is told through faded photos of workers on assembly lines, or operating basic tools. But that was the 1970s, and in the 21st century, a factory has a lot more robots. Usi... Read more...
26 January 2017
A multitude of studies weaken the prophecy of universal income advocates: that of researchers Georg Graetz and Guy Michaels (2015) , who found, by analyzing seventeen countries over fifteen years, the robot ha... Read more...
Evidence published in 2015 by Michaels and Graetz from a dataset of companies in 17 countries gathered between 1993 and 2007, suggests that while productivity increases with robotic innovation and some semi-sk... Read more...
16 January 2017
We have seen signs that the companies which manage to exploit the robots and the Internet of Things (IoT) in their production machinery can compete with factories in the distant economies. This trend is furthe... Read more...
23 December 2016
Economists Nicholas Bloom of Stanford and John Van Reenen of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (along with several co-authors) have been compiling evidence for a while now that companies that follow ma... Read more...
21 December 2016
A conversation with MIT’s John Van Reenen When we talk about innovators, we normally talk about how someone becomes one—not when. We talk about the success or failure of their experiments, produ... Read more...
16 December 2016
Anna Valero, the London School of Economics, and John Van Reenen of MIT assessed exactly how much universities contributed to GDP. A total of 78 countries were examined over six decades, looking... Read more...
18 November 2016
The rate of growth in technological innovations in China has increased significantly in the past two decades (see Figure 1). What's more, it is widely believed that the ability to learn from foreign technology and chase ... Read more...
13 October 2016
In today's interview, we sat down with Alan Manning, Professor of Labour Economics at the London School of Economics. He is a leading author in his field, particularly in understanding the imperfections of labour markets... Read more...
27 September 2016
Must-Read: Anna Valero and John Van Reenen: 'The Economic Impact of Universities: Evidence from Across the Globe' This article was published online by the Washington Center for Equitable Growth on September 22, 2016 Li... Read more...
22 September 2016
A recent research paper by Anna Valero and John Van Reenen of the LSE takes a statistical look at universities around the world, asking whether they seem to boost their regional economies. (Examples of a ''region'' inclu... Read more...
31 August 2016
''We estimate fixed effects models at the sub-national level between 1950 and 2010 and find that increases in the number of universities are positively associated with future growth of GDP per capita (and this relationsh... Read more...
23 August 2016
Most of the work on the value of college has focused on whether the return is worth the student's considerable investment. (Thus far, the yeas still have it.) But more and more research lately has asked whether colleges ... Read more...
19 August 2016
The likely Locus of search robots and packaging of 25 thousand square meter warehouse helps to increase the productivity of the warehouse up to 800 percent. A previous study of Georg Graetz scientists and Guy Michaels (... Read more...
16 August 2016
Davvero i robot ci ruberanno il lavoro? A che cosa serve davvero l'automazione? Tutte queste predicazioni hanno in comune di invitare i popoli ad abbandonare qualsiasi progetto di poter in qualche modo essere protagonist... Read more...
12 August 2016
Article by John Denham For the past 20 years and longer, Ministers of all parties have wanted to see more employers support employees and apprentices to gain higher levels skills and higher education. With strong bi-par... Read more...
03 August 2016
... Do we need a different way to spur innovation and disseminate new technologies quickly around the world? Are patents, which reward inventors by providing them with a government-guaranteed monopoly over their inventio... Read more...
12 April 2016
In the period 1993-2007, manufacturing employment in this country fell by around 55%, while the use of robots rose by around 80%. By contrast, Germany’s deployment of robots rose by around 165% and its m... Read more...
15 February 2016
CEP's Anna Valero written evidence for the Government's Productivity Plan Inquiry contributed to the final report. The Government's heralded 'Productivity Plan' lacks clear, measurable objectives and largely amounts to ... Read more...
29 January 2016
Chancellor George Osborne survived the Bush Tucker trial that was Wednesday's spending review. ... Professor John Van Reenen, director of the Centre for Economic Performance, said: ''The sexy centrefold was a naked rever... Read more...
28 November 2015
Anna Valero suggests ways to deal with deficits in skills, infrastructure and innovation. This article was published online by the LSE Business Review blog on 23 November, 2015 Link to article here Related publicati... Read more...
23 November 2015
In order of importance, it can be compared with the steam machine's breakthrough in the beginnings of industrialisation, according to Department of Economics Researcher George Graetz at Uppsala University. This article ... Read more...
16 November 2015
Article by Bill Gates Last month, during a trip to Europe, I mentioned that I plan to invest $1 billion in clean energy technology over the next five years. This will be a fairly big increase over the investments I am a... Read more...
03 August 2015
So if innovation seems to be booming, why has productivity growth been muted? A common argument is that the effect of innovation is being incorrectly measured. The advent of the Sharing Economy, which forms a chapter in ... Read more...
30 July 2015
Then there is the vital question of productivity. As Professor John van Reenen from the LSE observes, ''What the Chancellor didn't mention is that UK GDP per person is 16 per cent lower than we would have expected on pr... Read more...
27 March 2015
Alan Manning, an economist at the London School of Economics, takes issue with the assertion that economic trends observed in the US are caused by technological unemployment. While he agrees US data shows rising producti... Read more...
09 February 2015
Why have the number of startups increased? The economic downturn has led to the rise in the number of startups over recent years, says John Van Reenen, director at the Centre for Economic Performance and professor of ... Read more...
19 January 2015
The process of invention has long been a cumulative one, in which incremental advances are made on previous innovations. Cites CEP Discussion Paper No1205 (updated June 2014) by Alberto Galasso and Mark Schankerman on... Read more...
25 July 2014
A new study adds some empirical firepower to the idea that poor patent laws are crushing innovation in the technology industry. Researchers from the London School of Economics studied citations from patents that were inv... Read more...
12 July 2014
Article by Tim Besley and John Van Reenen In 2013 the LSE Growth Commission published a report into future UK growth. The aim of the Commission was to identify institutions and policies that could generate more growth i... Read more...
10 July 2014
The future of the American worker depends on research and innovation. This matters not just for Apple's profits, but for the future of the American economy. Although patents in theory protect intellectual property, ... Read more...
28 September 2012