Luis Garicano

Luis Garicano Gabilondo (born 1967 in Valladolid) is a Spanish economist and politician who was a Member of the European Parliament (MEP) from 2019 to 2022.

He was also vice president of Renew Europe and vice president of the European political party Alliance of Liberals and Democrats for Europe (ALDE Party).

Before entering politics, he was a professor of strategy and economics at IE Business School in Madrid and at the London School of Economics (LSE).

After leaving the European Parliament he has returned to academia as a visiting professor at Columbia Business School and at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business.

Luis Garicano was born in Valladolid.

He is the son of Ana Gabilondo and Luis Garicano.

He studied at the San José School, a Jesuit school, in his hometown.

Garicano obtained bachelor's degrees in economics (1990) and Law (1991) from the University of Valladolid.

Subsequently, he obtained a master's degree in European economic studies from the College of Europe in Bruges (Belgium) in 1992 and a second master's degree in economics from the University of Chicago in 1995.

Garicano has worked as an economist for the European Commission (between 1992 and 1993), for the consulting firm McKinsey & Company (1998) and for the Foundation for Applied Economics Studies (2010), where he held the McKinsey Chair.

He received his doctorate (PhD) in economics from the same institution three years later, in 1998.

At the University of Chicago, his thesis supervisor was Sherwin Rosen, one of the leading labor economists of the 20th century.

During his time there he was also the teaching assistant of Gary Becker and Kevin M. Murphy, two of the main exponents of the theory of human capital; the economic theory which argues for the quality and education of workers as the main factor in fostering economic growth.

After obtaining his doctorate he was hired as an assistant professor at the Booth School of Business, where he continued to study the economics of knowledge within labor markets.

His first academic article (2000) "Hierarchies and the organization of knowledge in production", argues that hierarchies within companies are tools to manage knowledge and promote specialization.

He would go on to become an associate professor in 2002 and a full professor (tenured) in 2006.

During his stay in Chicago, he was also a visiting professor at the Sloan School of Management, the Pompeu Fabra University and the London Business School.

In another article with Esteban Rossi Hansberg (2006), "Organization and inequality in the knowledge economy", they explore this theory of the firm further to see how information and communication technologies might differently affect business organization and inequality: while information technologies decentralize and increase the returns to knowledge throughout the distribution, communication technologies centralize and, consequently, have the opposite effect.

In 2007, he received the Banco Herrero Foundation Award to the best Spanish economist under 40 years of age.

In 2008 he transferred to the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) as a professor (chair) of economics and strategy and as the director of research as a part of the founding team of the new management department.

In November 2008, at the inauguration of the new building of this department, after giving a presentation on the financial crisis Queen Elizabeth II asked Garicano what would become an infamous question: Why did nobody see the crisis coming?

Specifically, the book proposes educational and institutional reforms to encourage meaningful growth and avoid the perverse incentives that caused the 2008 financial crisis.

Taking part in groups such as Euro-Economics and the Council for the European Crisis of the Institute for New Economic Thinking (INET), Garicano has also been one of the leading economists advocating structural reforms to the European financial system.

He was a member of the group of economists led by Markus Brunnermeier that developed the European Safe Bonds (ESBies) proposal for the creation of securities backed by a diversified portfolio of euro area central government bonds.

In 2009 he founded the blog Nada Es Gratis to promote a more sophisticated public discourse grounded on evidence and economic methods, and the blog has grown to become the main economics blog in Spanish.

Two years later, and together with 5 other experts, Garicano published his first book (under the same name as the blog) in which they argued for reforms to the Spanish economy to ensure productivity and promote growth.

At LSE he also founded and directed the master's program in economics and management and, in 2011, became the group head of the Managerial Economics and Strategy Group.

Between January 2012 and April 2016, he was also an independent member of the board of directors of Liberbank.

In line with his influences at the University of Chicago, his research focuses on productivity, technological innovation and the organization of work; also focusing on inequality, economic growth and banking systems.

In 2012 he was part of a commission of 11 experts to reform the Spanish university system.

In 2013 he published a manifesto in conjunction with Carles Casajuana, César Molinas and Elisa de la Nuez advocating for a reform to political party regulation, which ended up being supported by around a hundred Spanish intellectuals.

This theory was successfully tested in his 2014 article with Nick Bloom, Raffaella Sadun, and John Van Reenen: "The distinct effects of information technology and communication technology in the organization of the company".

This vision of organizations goes further than other theories (such as that of firms as aligning incentives) and has been recognized, Garicano having published in the main economic journals, including the Quarterly Journal of Economics, the Journal of Political Economy, The Review of Economic Studies, the American Economic Review and the Journal of Economic Perspectives.

For years, Luis Garicano has actively promoted structural reforms to Spanish institutions and the economy, especially in the labor market and the health and pension systems.

His activism is often compared the activist regenerationism of José Ortega y Gasset.

In this line, he is a frequent contributor of opinion and analysis to main news outlets, including the Financial Times, El País and El Mundo.

In 2014 he published his first solo book, El dilema de España (Spain's dilemma), in which he argues Spain must choose between becoming the Denmark or the Venezuela of southern Europe.

In May 2017 he joined the Business School of IE University as professor of economics and strategy.

There he is also the director of the Center for the Digital Economy, which supports the development of the academic fields of economics, business, sociology and law.

Additionally, he is a researcher at the Center for Economic Policy Research and is affiliated with the Center for Economic Performance.