Growth Academy

This faculty-led project, directed by Ufuk Akcigit, investigates how innovation, firm behavior, and institutional capacity interact to shape long-run economic growth. At its core is a simple but urgent question: why do some economies continually renew themselves through innovation, while others fall into persistent slowdowns—even when access to technology appears similar?

Akcigit’s research addresses this question by combining economic theory with rich microdata on firms, inventors, and industries. Using large administrative datasets and modern empirical techniques, the project traces how incentives, market structure, and policy environments influence innovation choices and productivity outcomes. Rather than treating growth as an abstract macroeconomic outcome, this work foregrounds the underlying mechanisms—who innovates, where, and under what constraints.

A central pillar of the project is the Growth Academy, an intensive global training and research platform that brings together economists, policymakers, and practitioners from diverse institutional contexts. Participants engage hands-on with frontier methods and data to analyze real-world growth challenges, from declining business dynamism to barriers facing new and innovative firms. The Growth Academy emphasizes durable capacity-building: equipping institutions not only to adopt best practices, but to generate their own evidence-based growth strategies.

This research and training agenda is closely linked to Akcigit’s contributions to the World Development Report, the World Bank’s flagship publication shaping global development policy. Insights from firm-level and innovation-focused research feed directly into the analytical frameworks of the WDR, while policy questions emerging from the WDR help guide new lines of academic inquiry. This two-way exchange ensures that theoretical advances remain grounded in real institutional constraints—and that policy frameworks are informed by the best available evidence.

A defining feature of the project is its attention to periods of disruption. Technological change, globalization, and geopolitical shocks can unsettle established growth models, amplifying both opportunity and risk. Akcigit’s work examines how institutions can adapt to these moments—designing policies that encourage experimentation and entry without entrenching incumbency or stifling competition.

In linking innovation research, global training, and policy engagement, this project exemplifies how computationally intensive social science can inform some of the most consequential economic decisions facing the world today. It offers a framework for understanding growth not as a mechanical outcome of technology, but as a dynamic process shaped by incentives, institutions, and collective choice.

Ufuk Akcigit
Furkan Kilic
Sinan Parmar
Prathusha Dinesh
Enrico Stivella