Frank Neffke

Research group:

The Transforming Economies Lab studies how individuals, firms, cities, and countries learn to do new things. It investigates how workers change careers, how firms diversify, how regions transform their economies, and how global forces like migration and investment reshape capabilities for transformation in local economies. Using large-scale structured and unstructured datasets, the lab analyzes the digital traces of individuals, firms and economies and applies tools from network science, statistics, natural language processing, and machine learning to understand the mechanisms that drive economic transformation and the coordination of distributed expertise in modern societies. 

Short bio:

Frank Neffke studies economic transformation in work that bridges research in economic geography, innovation, management, labor economics, and complexity science. After earning a PhD from Utrecht University, he held positions at the Erasmus School of Economics, the Harvard Kennedy School of Government, where he became Research Director of the Growth Lab, and the Complexity Science Hub in Vienna, where he leads a team studying how skills, knowledge, and technologies evolve in modern economies. His research examines how individuals, firms, and regions develop new capabilities, using large-scale data, network science, econometrics, and machine learning. 

„Progress depends on our ability to learn new things, individually and collectively. My work seeks to understand how we first distribute, then coordinate and recombine knowledge to shape the economic futures of people, firms, and places.„

Frank Neffke, Professor of Economic Transformation and Complexity