Luis Garicano returned in the Summer of 2023 to the London School of Economics as a Full Professor at the School of Public Policy. He started his academic career at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, where he attained the rank of full professor in Economics and Strategy after 10 years on the faculty and then at the London School of Economics, where he has been Full Professor in Economics and Strategy at the departments of Economics and Management of the school and head of the Managerial Economics and Strategy Group; in addition, he has been visiting professor at other institutions, among others MIT, Columbia Business School and the London Business School. He has held positions as an economist of the European Commission and McKinsey & Company, where he has also held a named chair with the FEDEA foundation.
His research has appeared in the leading international academic journals in economics, including The Quarterly Journal of Economics, The Journal of Political Economy, The American Economic Review and The Review of Economic Studies.
Garicano’s research focuses on the impact of organization and technology on aggregate economic variables like the wage distribution, productivity, or economic growth. He has studied why organizations and institutions fail and how to better design them. He has also studied how specific digital technologies are transforming the economy, such as for instance business to business electronic commerce, portable computing, enterprise resource planning or blockchain. His research has shown that it is the interaction between technology and its implementation, through organizational change, that really matters to induce productivity and change. His more recent research has studied how to build better institutions in Europe to avoid new economic crisis in the Eurozone.
For a few years, Garicano stepped out of academia and became a Member of the European Parliament (MEP) from 2019 to August 2022. While in Parliament he was a vice president of the Renew Europe Group in Parliament in charge of economic affairs and a vice president of the European political party Alliance of Liberals and Democrats for Europe (ALDE Party). He was a co-drafter of the legislation for the European Recovery and Reconstruction Fund, of the initial legislation on the Carbon Adjustment Mechanism, and led the efforts of the centrist group of the European Parliament (RenewEurope) on Russian sanctions and aid to Ukraine- he travelled with this purpose to Lviv and Kyiv twice on the first 2 months of the war. He recently co-wrote (with Beatrice Weder di Mauro and Dominc Rohner) a CEPR book on the “Economic Consequences of the Ukraine War”
Luis Garicano holds bachelor’s degrees in economics and law from Universidad de Valladolid, a Master’s degree in European Economic Studies from the College of Europe in Bruges, and a Master’s degree and a Ph.D. in Economics from the University of Chicago.
He has contributed opinion pieces to international media (e.g. Financial Times, Le Monde, Wall Street Journal or The Economist) and Spanish media (including e.g. El País, El Mundo, ABC and El Confidencial).