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Demand for cleaner, more efficient technologies is transforming global markets and with it, the geography of innovation. Over the last 15 years, markets for new energy technologies and climate resilience have outpaced gr...Read more...
Samuel Asuquo Edet, Chiara Criscuolo, Ejona Fuli, Selin Gonca Ozyurt, Ralf Martin, Chhavi Rastogi, Samuel Rosenow, Fabian Scheifele, Trang Thu Tran, Verena Wiedemann, Nadege Yameogo and Golvine de Rochambeau
15 July 2025
Novel products, processes and technologies are important drivers of economic growth. Davide Coluccia and Gaia Dossi show how migrants from Britain to the United States in the late 19th and early 20th century not only too...Read more...
Davide M. Coluccia and Gaia Dossi
20 June 2025
As the debate around industrial policy intensifies, there is broad consensus on the rationale for government support to encourage private sector innovation. Economy-wide returns from research and development (R&D) in the...Read more...
Matej Bajgar and Chiara Criscuolo
13 June 2025
Large language models can conduct interviews at speed and at scale. Friedrich Geiecke and Xavier Jaravel present a new open source platform to support this innovative form of qualitative research....Read more...
Friedrich Geiecke and Xavier Jaravel
20 February 2025
Some artificial intelligence technologies are more data intensive than others. This column examines how data privacy regulation shaped the trajectory of AI innovation across countries, looking at patent applications from...Read more...
Pia Andres, Carl Benedikt Frey and Giorgio Presidente
5 January 2025
Alexandra Roulet and Philippe Aghion explain how consumers' green conscience can foster clean innovation and provide tips for how companies can reach green goals in a highly competitive market....Read more...
Philippe Aghion and Alexandra Roulet
25 April 2024
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
John Van Reenen introduces his new book, The Economics of Creative Destruction, co-edited with Ufuk Akcigit, which explores how technological innovation can be used to drive growth and tackle problems from inequality to ...Read more...
John Van Reenen
25 September 2023
Britain's productivity shortfall is its foundational economic problem. Debate about this gap and how to fix it typically focus on raising productivity of existing firms, via two routes. First, innovation: investment, R&D...Read more...
Richard Davies, Nadim Hamdan and Gregory Thwaites
Many scholars have been concerned that slower growth in countries with heavy labour regulations could be due to firms' reluctance to innovate given the burden of red tape. Philippe Aghion, Antonin Bergeaud and John Van R...Read more...
Philippe Aghion, Antonin Bergeaud and John Van Reenen
19 April 2023
The technology frontier that was dominated by the United States, Europe and Japan in the early 2000s is now much more polarised between the American and Chinese patent offices. Antonin Bergeaud and Cyril Verluise show th...Read more...
Antonin Bergeaud and Cyril Verluise
21 February 2023
Investing in innovation is key to the future prosperity of an advanced economy such as the UK. Chancellor Jeremy Hunt's 17 November autumn statement confirmed a commitment to raising public investments in science. Despit...Read more...
Anna Valero and John Van Reenen
28 November 2022
In a push for more tech breakthroughs, China is ramping up state spending on research and development. But without creating space for private sector innovation, China is unlikely to achieve the kind of results it wants....Read more...
Simon Commander and Saul Estrin
10 November 2022
Public investment in developing energy sources that don't cause climate change is a strategy for economic growth that could also contribute to the UK's levelling up agenda, says Ralf Martin. His analysis indicates that s...Read more...
Ralf Martin
24 October 2022
New technologies will play a vital role in achieving net zero. Getting them on stream and in widespread use fast enough to prevent climate catastrophe calls for bold and urgent action to unblock essential investment....Read more...
Anna Valero
27 September 2022
This chapter provides a selective review of policies that can help foster a transition towards green technologies. R&I are crucial to tackling sustainability challenges, and public policies are needed to direct technolog...Read more...
Eugenie Dugoua
1 August 2022
This report, the 19th report for The Economy 2030 Inquiry, provides a hard-headed assessment of the opportunities presented to UK plc by the move to net zero, and considers how best these can be unlocked. It does this by...Read more...
Brendan Curran, Ralf Martin, Sabrina Muller, Viet Nguyen-Tien, Juliana Oliveira-Cunha, Esin Serin, Arjun Shah, Anna Valero and Dennis Verhoeven
23 May 2022
John Van Reenen, Nicholas Bloom, and Raffaella Sadun explain how the World Management Survey provides the evidence needed for designing industrial strategies to tackle low productivity....Read more...
Nicholas Bloom, Raffaella Sadun and John Van Reenen
20 May 2022
Innovation drives economic growth, however data indicates innovative capability differs across economies. Simon Commander, Saul Estrin and Thamashi De Silva suggest democracy is associated with more innovation overall, t...Read more...
Simon Commander, Thamashi De Silva and Saul Estrin
5 April 2022
Economics is the study of how to share out scarce resources. But it is also about how to make those resources less scarce by creating a bigger economic pie to share. The key to economic growth is increased productivity -...Read more...
3 March 2022
What research and innovation (R&I) policies should Europe adopt? The world faces a challenge to rebuild after the pandemic, but also faces the same structural slowdown of productivity growth that occurred in the decades ...Read more...
Andreas Teichgraeber and John Van Reenen
25 February 2022
Philippe Aghion and Isabelle Laporte explain how, with the proper safeguards, creative destruction - the process by which the new replaces the old - remains the way to greater economic growth and prosperity....Read more...
Philippe Aghion and Isabelle Laporte
14 June 2021
The climate crisis and the global economic impact of the Covid-19 crisis occur against a background of slowing growth and widening inequalities, which together imply an urgent need for a new environmentally sustainable a...Read more...
Nicholas Stern and Anna Valero
1 June 2021
This paper studies the implications of perceived default risk for aggregate output and productivity. Using a model of credit contracts with moral hazard, we show that a firm’s probability of default is a sufficient stati...Read more...
Timothy Besley, Isabelle Roland and John Van Reenen
21 January 2020
Slow growth over the last decade has prompted policy attention towards increasing R&D spending, often via the tax system. We examine the impact of R&D on firm performance, both by the firm's own investments and through p...Read more...
Nicholas Bloom, Brian Lucking and John Van Reenen
1 December 2019
