John Van Reenen is Ronald Coase School Professor at the London School of Economics and Digital Fellow, Initiative for the Digital Economy at the Massachusetts Institute for Technology (MIT). Until 2020 he was Gordon Billard Professor in the MIT Economics Department and Sloan Management School. He has published over a hundred 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 Yrjö 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 an honorary Foreign Member of the American Economic Association (2022), 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.
He has worked as an economic expert on many competition cases including the landmark 2004 European Commission vs. Microsoft; regulatory appeals, major mergers (e.g. Pfizer/Pharmacia, Reed/Harcourt, GE/Honeywell, Oracle/PeopleSoft, UPM Kymmene/Norske Skog/Haindl and Compass/Rail Gourmet), the Competition Commission Inquiry into Call Termination Charges as well as litigation and damages cases. He has been an expert witness in several cases, such as the Visa case in the High Court. Professor Van Reenen’s clients have included a numbers of leading companies such as Adidas, Asda, British Telecom, Centrica, Compass, McKinsey & Co, Ernst & Young, GSK, Orange, Pfizer and Sun Microsystems.
He has been a member of the European Economic Advisory Committee to the Chief Economist of DG-COMP as well as a senior advisor to Downing Street, the Health Secretary and Treasury. He has been a Visiting Professor at the University of California at Berkeley, Stanford, Harvard and Princeton. He was Director of the Centre for Economic Performance (2003-2016), Professor at University College London (1994-2003) and the Chief Technology Officer of a software start-up.