Dr François Lafond

Deputy Director, Complexity Economics Programme

Senior Research Associate, Mathematical Institute, University of Oxford

Biography

François is Deputy Director of the Complexity Economics group, Lead Researcher at the Mathematical Institute, and an Associate member of Nuffield college. His main areas of research are in the economics of innovation and productivity, environmental economics, networks and complex systems, applied econometrics and forecasting.

Recent Publications

The unequal effects of the health–economy trade-off during the COVID-19 pandemic

Nature Human Behaviour 16 Nov 23
In counterfactual experiments, we show that a similar trade-off between epidemic and economic outcom...

Economic Inequality

Building an alliance to map global supply networks

Science 20 Oct 23
The global economy consists of more than 300 million firms, connected through an estimated 13bn supp...

Foundations of Economics

No. 2023-19 - Reconstructing supply networks

INET Working Paper 03 Oct 23
Network reconstruction is a well-developed sub-field of network science, but it has only recently be...

Risk and Resilience

No. 2023-08 - Firm-level production networks: what do we (really) know?

INET Working Paper 16 May 23
Are standard production network properties similar across all available datasets, and if not, why?

Risk and Resilience Economic Growth and Innovation

Reconstructing production networks using machine learning

Journal of Economic Dynamics and Control 27 Feb 23
The vulnerability of supply chains and their role in the propagation of shocks has been highlighted ...

Foundations of Economics

No. 2022-02 - Reconstructing production networks using machine learning

INET Working Paper 09 Jan 23
In this study, we formulate supply chain networks’ reconstruction as a link prediction problem and t...

Financial System Stability

The unequal effects of the health-economy tradeoff during the COVID-19 pandemic

Paper 13 Dec 22
The potential tradeoff between health outcomes and economic impact has been a major challenge to pol...

Foundations of Economics

Forecasting the propagation of pandemic shocks with a dynamic input-output model

Journal of Economic Dynamics and Control 28 Sep 22
We introduce a dynamic disequilibrium input-output model that was used to forecast the economics of ...

Risk and Resilience Financial System Stability

Can Stimulating Demand Drive Costs Down? World War II as a Natural Experiment

The Journal of Economic History 11 Jul 22
U.S. military production during World War II increased at an impressive rate and led to large declin...

Technology and the Economy Economics of Sustainability Economic Growth and Innovation

No. 2022-08 - Why is productivity slowing down?

INET Working Paper 29 May 22
We review recent research on the slowdown of labor productivity and examine the contribution of diff...

Economic Growth and Innovation

No. 2019-14 - Measuring productivity dispersion: a parametric approach using the Lévy alpha-stable distribution

INET Working Paper 28 Apr 22
We examine in detail the distribution of labor productivity levels and growth, and observe that they...

Economic Growth and Innovation

No. 2021-12 - Why is productivity slowing down?

INET Working Paper 09 May 21
We review recent research on the slowdown of labor productivity and examine the con- tribution of di...

Technology and the Economy Economic Growth and Innovation

No. 2021-18 - In and out of lockdown: Propagation of supply and demand shocks in a dynamic input-output model

INET Working Paper 22 Feb 21
Economic shocks due to Covid-19 were exceptional in their severity, suddenness and heterogeneity acr...

Risk and Resilience Financial System Stability

The rise of science in low-carbon energy technologies

Renewable and Sustainable Energy Reviews 21 Jan 21
Designing efficient allocation of R&D budgets requires a better understanding of how Low-Carbon Ener...

Technology and the Economy Economics of Sustainability Economic Growth and Innovation

Occupational mobility and automation: a data-driven network model

Journal of the Royal Society Interface 21 Jan 21
In this article, we develop a data-driven model to analyse how workers move through an empirically d...

Technology and the Economy Economic Growth and Innovation