Transforming Economies Lab

Modern economies rely on the ability of individuals and organizations to develop new skills, adopt new technologies, and enter new industries. Yet this process of economic transformation, how workers shift careers, how firms expand their products and services, and how cities and countries build new capabilities, remains only partially understood. The Transforming Economies Lab (TE Lab) investigates these processes by focusing on a central question: how do we learn to do new things, individually and collectively? 

While individuals spend years acquiring knowledge through education and on the job learning, the total stock of knowledge in society is far too vast for any single person to master. Societies overcome this limitation by distributing knowledge across many experts and by building organizational and institutional arrangements that coordinate their complementary skills. Families, guilds, corporations, online platforms, and entire cities serve as mechanisms that combine and recombine expertise. Understanding these mechanisms is essential for grasping how economies learn at the collective level and why some regions succeed in transforming themselves while others stagnate. 

The lab studies these processes through the rich digital traces left by workers, firms, inventors, governments, and other economic actors. It uses complex network analysis to map how skills, technologies, and industries relate to one another, econometrics and causal inference to study the mechanisms driving structural change, and machine learning and natural language processing to extract information from unstructured data that describe behavior of individuals and of collectives. Together, these methods enable the lab to identify how new capabilities emerge, how expertise is coordinated, and how organizations, from small teams to entire countries, adapt to shifting economic landscapes. 

Concrete research questions include: How do individuals navigate career transitions, and what skills enable mobility? How do firms successfully diversify into new product lines? Which development pathways are feasible for cities and countries? How do migration and foreign investment reshape local capabilities, and how do local economies integrate newcoming workers and firms? How do teams form and coordinate distributed knowledge, and how do digital platforms change the way we collaborate? These questions span economic geography, labor economics, innovation studies, management, urban science, and complexity science, reflecting the lab’s interdisciplinary approach. 

By bridging micro level behaviors with macro level outcomes, the Transforming Economies Lab aims to provide new tools and insights for scholars, policymakers, and industry leaders seeking to understand and shape the forces that drive economic and technological change.