An Industrial Organisation Perspective on Firm Performance

Tinbergen Institute Economics Lecture 2024

Topic: An industrial organisation perspective on firm performance

In these lectures, Professor De Loecker presents an overview of the most recent advances in the industrial organisation literature on firm performance. Special focus is devoted to issues of measurement and identification of the drivers of firm performance. The lectures present and discuss the most recent empirical frameworks to estimate productivity, marginal costs and markups, using micro-level production data. These methods have been used to study the role of technology, market power and international competition in shaping the performance of individual producers, industries and economies at large.

Lecturer

Jan De Loecker is Professor of Economics at KU Leuven, Belgium, a Fellow of the Econometric Society, Research Associate at the NBER and a Research Fellow at CEPR. He obtained his PhD in economics from KU Leuven in 2006. He was on the faculty at NYU from 2006-2008, before moving to Princeton University, where he was on the full-time faculty from 2008-2017 (tenured 2014-2017). He was a visiting faculty at Yale University and Stanford University. He specializes in the areas of industrial organization, international economics and development economics.

His research is centered around measuring, and identifying the drivers of firm performance. In particular, he has put forward empirical frameworks to estimate productivity, marginal costs and markups, using micro-level production data. These methods have been used to study the role of technology, market power, international competition, in shaping the performance of individual producers, and industries and economies at large. He has published in leading journals, such as the American Economic Review, Econometrica, Journal of Political Economy, Quarterly Journal of Economics, and various field journals.

In 2016, he was awarded with an Odysseus Research Grant from the Flemish Research Council, and in 2019 he obtained a Consolidator ERC Grant for the project MPOWER. In 2023 he was awarded the Yrjö Jahnsson Award.

De Loecker has advised various corporations, institutions and international agencies (such as the World Bank, and various national and central banks) on productivity and firm performance measurement, on the impact of trade/industrial policy on growth. His work has been referenced in major news outlets (link).

General

The Tinbergen Institute Lectures are an annual series of advanced PhD level courses. Qualified internal and external research master and PhD students are explicitly invited to participate.

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