Mariana Mazzucato

Mariana Mazzucato
Born (1968-06-16) June 16, 1968
Rome, Italy
Nationality Italian; American
Institution University of Sussex (SPRU)
Field Economics
Alma mater The Graduate Faculty of The New School (Ph.D., 1999)
Tufts University (B.A., 1990)
Influences Joseph Schumpeter, John Maynard Keynes
Information at IDEAS / RePEc

Mariana Mazzucato (born June 16, 1968) is an economist, with dual Italian and American citizenship.[1] She is RM Phillips Professor in the Economics of Innovation at the University of Sussex, SPRU and author of The Entrepreneurial State: debunking public vs. private sector myths.[2]

Early life

Mazzucato's Italian parents, Ernesto and Alessandra, moved to Princeton, New Jersey in 1972, with their three young children, Valentina, Mariana and Jacopo, after Ernesto accepted a position as a physicist at Princeton University's Plasma Physics Laboratory. Mariana Mazzucato spent most of her life in the United States before returning to Europe in 2000.[3]

Education

Mazzucato obtained a Bachelor of Arts in history and international relations from Tufts University in 1990, a Masters in economics from the New School for Social Research in 1994, and a PhD in economics, also from the New School in 1999.[4]

Career

She became assistant professor of economics at the University of Denver in 1997.[4] Between 1998 - 1999 she was a Post-Doctoral Marie Curie Research Fellow at the London Business School where she worked and published papers with Paul Geroski (former Dean of the London Business School).[5][6][7] In 2000 she joined the Economics Department of the Open University as a Lecturer, becoming full Professor in 2004, where she founded and directed a research centre, Innovation, Knowledge and Development. From 2007 to 2009 she was visiting Professor at Bocconi University.[4] Mazzucato currently holds the RM Phillips Chair in the Economics of Innovation in SPRU, the University of Sussex, a chair previously held by leading innovation thinkers Christopher Freeman, Keith Pavitt and Nick Von Tunzelmann. In 2013 she published The Entrepreneurial State: debunking public vs. private sector myths (Anthem, 2013).[2] In 2014 she was awarded the New Statesman SPERI Prize in Political Economy for her work on the entrepreneurial state and innovation in the public sector. In 2013 The New Republic called her one of "the three most important thinkers about innovation".[8]

She is a member of the Scottish Government’s Council of Economic Advisors;[9] a member of the World Economic Forum's Council on the Economics of Innovation[10] and a permanent member of the European Commission’s expert group on Innovation for Growth (RISE).[11] From 2009 - 2012, Mazzucato was the Coordinator of a 3-year European Commission Framework Programmes 7 project on finance, innovation and growth, FINNOV][12] and Economics Director of the ESRC Centre for Social and Economic Research on Innovation in Genomics (Innogen).[4]

On September 27, 2015, it was announced that she had been appointed to the British Labour Party's Economic Advisory Committee, convened by Shadow Chancellor John McDonnell and reporting to Labour Party Leader Jeremy Corbyn,[13]

Research

Mazzucato's research focuses on the relationship between financial markets, innovation and economic growth - at the company, industry and national level.[14]

She works within the Schumpeterian framework of evolutionary economics, studying the origin and evolution of persistent differences between firms and how these differences vary across sectors and over the industry life-cycle.[5][7][15]

Her empirical studies have focused on the auto, PC, biotech and pharma industries. Her most recent work has analyzed the co-evolution of technological change and stock market bubbles. In this, she claims that stock price volatility tends to be highest at the firm and industry level, when technological innovation is the most "radical".[16][17][18]

In 2013, Mazzucato published ""The Entrepreneurial State: debunking public vs. private sector myths"" (Anthem).[2] The ideas in the book were first set out in a shorter pamphlet for the think tank Demos, called The Entrepreneurial State.[19] The 2013 book argues that the idea of the State as a static bureaucratic organisation only needed to ‘fix’ market failures, leaving dynamic entrepreneurship and innovation to the private sector, is wrong. She outlines a number of case studies across different sectors, including biotech, pharmaceuticals and clean technology, to show that the high-risk investments are being made by the state before the private sector gets involved. In a chapter examining the iPhone, she outlines how the technologies that make it ‘smart’ – the internet, GPS, its touchscreen display and the voice-activated Siri – were all Government funded.[20]

Two chapters in the book are dedicated to the emerging ‘green technology’ revolution. She details the public funds that she argues are laying the groundwork for this revolution in a similar way that the state invested in the most high-risk areas of biotech and nanotech.[21] The book concludes with the author's contention that in all these examples, the risks were socialized while the rewards were privatized, and considers different ways to change this dynamic to produce more ‘inclusive growth’.[22]

She has also focused on inequality in her work with William Lazonick (Professor and Director of the University of Massachusetts Center for Industrial Competitiveness). Their joint article, "The Risk-Reward Nexus: Who takes the risks? Who gets the rewards?" for a special issue of Corporate and Industrial Change, edited by Mazzucato, describes the tension between how value is created and how value is extracted in modern-day capitalism. The authors argue that there is a disproportionate balance between the 'collective' distribution of risk taking in the innovation process, and the increasingly narrow distribution of the rewards.[23] The paper was first published in a 2012 paper for the think tank Policy Network.[24]

Similarly, in another paper for the think tank Policy Network called "Rebalancing What?", Mazzucato argues that the problem is not only one of short-termism, it is also about the way in which financial activities focused on value extraction have been rewarded above activities focused on value creation – often leading to value destruction.[25]

Critics have argued that Mazzucato offers a confused definition of "public goods," which is a "crucial point," since "the non-rivalrous and non-excludable nature [of public goods] make them difficult to profit from providing," and thus the private sector cannot, by definition, be interested in them.[26]

Others claim that she is "too hard on business"[27] but acknowledge that "she is right to argue that the state has played a central role in producing game-changing breakthroughs, and that its contribution to the success of technology-based businesses should not be underestimated."[27]

Martin Wolf wrote that The Entrepreneurial State offers "a controversial thesis," but "it is basically right,"[28] and warns that the "failure to recognise the role of the government in driving innovation may well be the greatest threat to rising prosperity."[28] Another critic stated that "it is one thing to legitimize the state as a driver of innovation and give credit where credit is due — something [Mazzucato's] book does masterfully", but "it is another thing altogether to craft effective innovation policy that deals with risk in a politically acceptable way."[29]

Selected publications

Books

Articles

Personal life

Mazzucato is married to Carlo Cresto-Dina, an Italian film producer, and they have four children.[3]

References

  1. ↑ "Curriculum Vitae". Official website. Mariana Mazzucato. Retrieved 30 December 2015.
  2. 1 2 3 http://www.anthempress.com/the-entrepreneurial-state
  3. 1 2 Alessandra Mazzucato obituary, Town Topics, 16 February 2011
  4. 1 2 3 4 , Official website
  5. 1 2 Geroski, P. and Mazzucato, M. (2002), "Modelling the Dynamics of Industry Populations", International Journal of Industrial Organization, Vol. 19 (7), pp. 1003–1022.
  6. ↑ Geroski, P. and Mazzucato, M. (2002), "Myopic Selection and the Learning Curve", Metroeconomica, Vol. 53 (2), pp. 181–199.
  7. 1 2 Geroski, P. and Mazzucato, M. (2002), "Learning and the Sources of Corporate Growth", Industrial and Corporate Change, Vol. 11 (4), pp. 623–644.
  8. ↑ http://www.newrepublic.com/article/114395/three-most-important-thinkers-about-innovation-you-dont-know
  9. ↑ http://www.gov.scot/Topics/Economy/Council-Economic-Advisers/Membership
  10. ↑ http://www.weforum.org/content/global-agenda-council-economics-innovation-2014
  11. ↑
  12. ↑ (
  13. ↑ "Labour announces new Economic Advisory Committee". Labour Press. 27 September 2015. Retrieved 11 March 2016.
  14. ↑ http://www.sussex.ac.uk/profiles/111262/publications
  15. ↑ Demirel, P. and Mazzucato, M. (2010), The Evolution of Firm Growth Dynamics in the US Pharmaceutical Industry, Regional Studies, Volume 44 Issue 8, 1053
  16. ↑ Mazzucato, M. and Tancioni, M. (2008), Idiosyncratic Risk and Innovation: A Firm and Industry Level Analysis, Industrial and Corporate Change, Vol. 17 (4): 779–811
  17. ↑ Mazzucato, M. (2003), Risk, Variety and Volatility: Innovation, Growth and Stock Prices in Old and New Industries, Journal of Evolutionary Economics, Vol. 13 (5): 491–512
  18. ↑ Mazzucato, M. (2002), The PC Industry: New Economy or Early Life-Cycle, Review of Economic Dynamics, Vol. 5: 318–345
  19. ↑ The Entrepreneurial State
  20. ↑ Mazzucato, M (2013). The Entrepreneurial State: debunking public vs. private sector myths. Anthem. ISBN 978-0-85728-252-1.
  21. ↑ Mazzucato, M (2013). The Entrepreneurial State: debunking public vs. private sector myths. Anthem. pp. 113–164. ISBN 978-0-85728-252-1.
  22. ↑ Mazzucato, M. The Entrepreneurial State: debunking public vs. private sector myths. Anthem. pp. 181–191. ISBN 978-0-85728-252-1.
  23. ↑ Lazonick, W. and Mazzucato, M. (2013), “The risk-reward nexus in the innovation-inequality relationship: Who takes the risks? Who gets the rewards?,” Industrial and Corporate Change, M. Mazzucato (ed.), 22(4):1093-1128
  24. ↑ M. (2012), Policy Network, The Risk-Reward Nexus: The Risk-Reward Nexus: Innovation, Finance and Inclusive Growth
  25. ↑ Mazzucato, M. (2012), Policy Network, Rebalancing What?: Reforming finance for creative destruction not destructive creation
  26. ↑ "The Intellectual Hole At The Heart Of Mariana Mazzucato's Entrepreneurial State" by Tim Worstall, Forbes, 15 December 2013
  27. 1 2 "The entrepreneurial state", The Economist, 31 August 2013
  28. 1 2 "A much-maligned engine of innovation" by Martin Wolf, The Financial Times, 4 August 2013
  29. ↑ "Winners only the state can pick: Mariana Mazzucato's The Entrepreneurial State" by Robert D. Atkinson, The Hill, 23 June 2013

External links

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