Instructors

Jan de Loecker (KU Leuven)

Dates

8-12 September 2025

Hours

9:30 to 13:00 CEST

Format

In person

Practical Classes

There will be between two and three voluntary sessions in the afternoon (from 15:00 to 17:00) led by a teaching assistant. Exact dates will be announced before the beginning of the course.

Intended for

Academics, researchers, practitioners, and graduate students interested in industrial organization and firm performance.

Prerequisites

First-year Master or PhD level in econometrics and microeconomics.

Overview

The objective of this course is to introduce the main questions and methodologies in the analysis of firm performance from the point of view of the Industrial Organization literature. Participants will learn how to critically evaluate empirical work in Industrial Organization, and related fields studying firm performance (such as trade, macro, and development economics) and develop tools for research. The empirical work covered will typically have a close tie to a theoretical model. The basic structure of the course will involve presentation and discussion of papers that should be read in advance. Problem sets will be made available to implement the estimation routines and analysis presented during the lectures.

Topics

• Cost and production: An IO perspective
• Production Analysis: Estimating production functions
• An empirical framework to study market power
• Market power and pass-through
• Market power and misallocation

Jan De Loecker is Professor of Economics and Research Professor (BOF) at the KU Leuven, a Fellow of the Econometric Society, former Research Associate at the NBER and a Research Fellow at the CEPR. He obtained his PhD in economics from KU Leuven in 2006. He was on the faculty at NYU from 2006-2008, before moving to Princeton University, where he was on the full-time faculty from 2008-2017 (tenured 2014-2017). He was a visiting faculty at Yale University and Stanford University. He specializes in the areas of industrial organization, international economics and development economics.

His research is centered around measuring, and identifying the drivers of firm performance. In particular, he has put forward empirical frameworks to estimate productivity, marginal costs and markups, using micro-level production data. These methods have been used to study the role of technology, market power, international competition, in shaping the performance of individual producers, and industries and economies at large. He has published in leading journals, such as the American Economic Review, Econometrica, Journal of Political Economy, Quarterly Journal of Economics, and various field journals.

In 2016, he was awarded with an Odysseus Research Grant from the Flemish Research Council, and in 2019 he obtained a Consolidator ERC Grant for the project MPOWER. In 2023, he was awarded the Yrjö Jahnsson Award.

De Loecker has advised various corporations, institutions and international agencies (such as the World Bank, and various national and central banks) on productivity and firm performance measurement, on the impact of trade/industrial policy on growth. His work has been referenced in major news outlets.

De Loecker is a Managing Editor at The Review of Economic Studies, starting January 1st 2025.