Welcome to the Farhi Innovation Lab!
Founded at the Collège de France by Philippe Aghion and named in memory of Emmanuel Farhi, our lab explores one of the most exciting questions in economics today: what really drives innovation and growth?
Based at the Collège de France and INSEAD, we dig into innovation, productivity, firm dynamics, entrepreneurship, and growth. By pairing fresh microdata with the energy of young researchers and the experience of leading economists, we produce work that aims at reaching the world’s top academic economic journals.
Research Focus
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Innovation and Science
How does innovation drive economic progress? What makes firms invest in new ideas? Does competition encourage or stifle innovation? How can we best foster science and innovation?
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Growth
What drives long-term economic growth? Why do some countries keep growing while others fall behind? How does innovation create both opportunity and disruption? What policies help economies grow faster and thrive?
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Environment
How can innovation help fight climate change? How can policy redirect innovation toward clean technologies? Can competition make firms greener? How can the green transition create new jobs and industries?
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Labor, Technology & Automation
How do new technologies change the way firms produce? Does automation destroy jobs, or can it create new ones? Which workers benefit from technological change? How should governments help workers adapt to new technologies?
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Artificial Intelligence
Can AI make workers more productive? Will AI create more jobs than it destroys? Which workers and firms benefit most from AI? What policies can help society benefit from AI?
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Productivity
Why are some firms much more productive than others? How do new technologies change productivity growth? Why has productivity slowed down in many advanced economies? How can public policy support productivity growth?
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Next event
Seminar October
Speaker 1: TBA. Speaker 2: Alexandra Roulet – TBA.
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Date
16 October 2026
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Location
3 rue d'Ulm, 75005 Paris + Zoom
Publications
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Green AI in Industry: Quasi-Experimental Evidence from the Water Treatment Sector
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AI
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Climate
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Energy
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On the interaction between monetary policy, corporate balancesheets and structural reforms
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Growth
In this paper, we use cross-industry, cross-country panel data to test if, and how monetary policycan affect growth. To do so, we use two alternative approaches. We first focus on the reactivity of real short term interest rates to the business cycle and show that its interaction with industry-level measures of financial constraints correlates positively […]
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Reforms and Dynamics of Income Evidence Using New Panel Data
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Taxation
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The Innovation Premium to Soft Skills in Low-Skilled Occupations
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Innovation
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Labor market
Matched employee-employer data from the UK are used to analyze the wage premium to working in an innovative firm. We find that firms that are more R&D intensive pay higher wages on average, and this is particularly true for workers in some low-skilled occupations. We propose a model in which a firm’s innovativeness is reflected […]
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Climate Change, Directed Innovation, and Energy Transition:The Long-run Consequences of the Shale Gas Revolution
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Climate
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Energy
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Growth
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Innovation
We investigate the short- and long-term effects of a shale gas boom in an economy where energy can be produced with coal, natural gas, or clean energy sources. In the short run, cheaper natural gas has counteracting effects on CO2 emissions: on the one hand it allows substitution away from coal which reduces CO2 emissions, […]
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