Philippe Aghion

Professor at the Collège de France, INSEAD and LSE

Area of Expertise

  • Competition
  • Creative Destruction
  • Growth
  • Technological Change

Biography

Philippe is Professor at the Collège de France, INSEAD, and the London School of Economics.

His work explores how innovation, competition, and creative destruction shape economic growth, and how institutions and public policy can support this process. Together with Peter Howitt, he developed the Schumpeterian growth paradigm, now central to the study of innovation-led growth and the role of the state in the growth process.

After fifteen years as Professor of Economics at Harvard University, he joined the Collège de France in 2015, where he holds the Chair of Economics of Institutions, Innovation and Growth, now home to the Farhi Innovation Lab.

He is a Fellow of the Econometric Society and of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and a member of the Académie des sciences morales et politiques. In 2025, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics, jointly with Joel Mokyr and Peter Howitt, for their work on innovation-driven growth.

Last publications

    • Innovation

    • Working Paper

    Resetting the Innovation Clock: Endogenous Growth through Technological Turnover

    Assessing the role of technology and data-driven governance in creating more livable and sustainable urban environments.

    Written by

    Published

    22 july 2025

    See publication

    • Growth

    • Innovation

    • Publication

    A Theory of Falling Growth and Rising Rents

    Exploring strategies to ensure equitable access to quality digital education across socioeconomic divides.

    Written by

    Published

    20 february 2023

    See publication

    • Growth

    • Publication

    Monetary Policy, Product Market Competition and Growth

    In this paper we argue that monetary easing fosters growth more in more credit-constrained environments, and the more so the higher the degree of product market competition. Indeed, when competition is low, large rents allow firms to stay on the market and reinvest optimally, no matter how funding conditions change with aggregate conditions. To test […]

    Written by

    Philippe Aghion

    See publication

    • Inequality

    • Innovation

    • Publication

    Innovation and Top Income Inequality

    In this article, we use cross-state panel and cross-U.S. commuting-zone data to look at the relationship between innovation, top income inequality and social mobility. We find positive correlations between measures of innovation and top income inequality. We also show that the correlations between innovation and broad measures of inequality are not significant. Next, using instrumental […]

    Written by

    Published

    June 2018

    See publication

    • Working Paper

    Social Skills and the Individual Wage Growth of Less Educated Workers

    This study employs matched employee-employer data from the UK to highlight the importance of social skills, in particular workers’ ability to work well in a team and communicate effectively with co-workers, as a driver of wage growth for workers with lower formal education. Our findings indicate that in tasks emphasizing social skills, such workers not […]

    Written by

    See publication

Contact

Education

  • PhD, Harvard University
  • Ecole Normale Supérieure Paris-Saclay
Return to researchers