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The Growth Lab’s research aims to uncover the mechanisms behind economic growth.

We approach this challenge from the perspective that economic development involves not just producing more of the same, but also upgrading the composition of what a place produces. For economies to grow, they must become more complex.

How do economies become more complex? We approach this question with a wide range of research that falls into roughly three categories – economic transformation, knowledge and technology diffusion, and the coordination of knowhow.

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How do economies become more complex, economic transformation, diffusion of knowledge, coordination of knowhow.

Economic transformation is the process by which the structure of an economy changes. Different goods or services require different capabilities for production; the capabilities needed to manufacture a car, for example, differ from those needed to run a hospital.

The output of countries, cities, firms, and individuals in turn can be upgraded by acquiring new capabilities, whether by building new institutional arrangements and infrastructure or by developing new corporate routines or skills. In this area of research, we examine these processes, studying how countries change their export baskets, how cities develop new industries, how firms diversify, and how individuals move along their careers.

An impediment to economic development is that the knowledge to implement technologies does not move easily from place to place.

As a consequence, many of the poorest parts of the world work with outdated technologies. One reason for this is that a crucial component of knowledge is deeply embedded in the skills of people and the routines of organizations. Thus, moving knowledge often requires moving skilled individuals and competent teams. To better understand this process we study the movement of people and firms, shedding light on the role of migration, foreign direct investment, and business travel in economic development. 

The world continues to add to the global stock of knowledge, but the cognitive capacity of individuals to absorb and use knowledge is limited. In response, societies have long divided knowledge across an expanding array of experts.

The challenge they now face is to coordinate these individuals into teams that, together, encompass all of the knowhow needed to produce complex goods and services in modern economies. To understand this challenge, we study factors that affect the coordination of knowhow, including the skill-composition of jobs, the formation of teams, global value chains, the role of cities as places where collective knowhow is coordinated, and the way changing institutions and technologies create new ways for individuals to collaborate.

Scrabble Logic

We often think of the logic of economic development using an analogy to the game of Scrabble. Like players in Scrabble, economies possess a set of capabilities – letters – that they can use to produce products – words.

More about Scrabble Logic

Different products require different letters. Accordingly, economic development involves finding out which products can be produced with a place’s current capabilities – what words it can write with the letters it currently has. It also involves finding out how new letters can be acquired. This model of the world has deep consequences, some of which are described in the  Atlas of Economic Complexity , the  urban scaling theory , and the  network structure of economic output , and understanding other consequences drives much of our research agenda.

The Scrabble logic plays out on different scales: Countries export a certain mix of products, regions and cities host a variety of industries, firms are active on different markets, and people have a range of skills that enable them to work in specific jobs. This is one reason why our research spans many different fields, such as international trade, economic geography, strategic management, labor economics and migration, and uses a variety of analytical approaches, such as econometrics and economic modeling, computer science, complexity sciences, and network analysis.

Understanding how economies develop involves questions that are far more complex than what a single researcher or field can address. Our research draws on multiple disciplines, bringing together researchers in physics, mathematics, economics, economic geography, computer science, engineering, and other fields to address two age-old challenges:

Why are some places so much richer than others, how can poorer places move up the ladder of development more quickly, publications & analysis.

Journal Article On the Design of Effective Sanctions: The Case of Bans on Exports to Russia

Latest GDP forecasts suggest the economic sanctions on Russia had a smaller impact than initially anticipated. In research newly published in Economic Policy , Ricardo Hausmann, Ulrich Schetter, and Muhammed Yildirim show that bans on exports to Russia can be made 60% more effective through improved coordination among sanctioning countries and by banning products with the highest impact on Russia.

Working Paper Eight Decades of Changes in Occupational Tasks, Computerization and the Gender Pay Gap

New research from Ljubica Nedelkoska, Shreyas Gadgin Matha, and others finds that computerization had two counteracting effects on the pay gap - it simultaneously reduced it by attracting more women into better-paying occupations, and increased it through higher returns to computer use among men.

• GLocal: A global development dataset of subnational administrative areas
• From Products to Capabilities: Constructing a Genotypic Product Space
• A journey through time: the story behind ‘eight decades of changes in occupational tasks, computerization and the gender pay gap’

The Growth Lab Seminar series is a weekly seminar that brings together researchers from across the academic spectrum who share an interest in growth and development.  

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The Academic Research Team primarily consists of postdoctoral fellows with expertise in economics, natural sciences, and computer sciences. 

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Through our Visiting Fellows and Scholars Program, every year the Growth Lab accepts a small number of visiting scholars to join the lab and pursue common research efforts.

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How research universities are evolving to strengthen regional economies

Subscribe to the brookings metro update, case studies from the build back better regional challenge, joseph parilla and joseph parilla senior fellow & director of applied research - brookings metro glencora haskins glencora haskins research associate and applied research manager - brookings metro.

February 9, 2023

When asked how to build a great city, the late Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan said, “Create a great university and wait 200 years.” Indeed, America’s network of research universities is one of its greatest sources of talent, entrepreneurship, and research and development—three inputs that in combination can fuel prosperity in the regions that surround those universities.   

Yet, while most strong regional economies have a leading research university, the reverse is not always true. That is because the link between university research, commercialization, and broader regional development is neither automatic nor immediate. Some universities are better at engaging with their surrounding industries and communities, and some regions have industries and communities that are more ready to translate the knowledge universities produce into economic development.  

The reality is that regional economies are complex, and their outcomes are influenced by countless interactions between markets and institutions—including but not limited to large research universities. Many inputs matter to regional economic development (e.g., business growth, job creation, skilled workers, well-planned built environments), but each is determined by separate regional systems that too often remain unintegrated. In other words, economic development is a “multi-system” process, but regions struggle with effective multi-system governance.   

A new wave of federal place-based economic policies led by the Department of Commerce’s Economic Development Administration (EDA) and the National Science Foundation is seeking to change this dynamic through larger-scale, longer-term competitive challenge grants that bring together networks of institutions, including research universities, around a targeted economic opportunity. And in addition to their sizable resources, these challenge grants are designed to catalyze multi-system strategies by requiring a lead regional entity to coordinate organizations across those systems.   

While many types of regional institutions could serve this function, research universities are increasingly embracing this role because they understand that regional economic impact requires blending university-based research and talent, industry partnerships, and coordinated governance. Drawing on one of those programs—the EDA’s $1 billion Build Back Better Regional Challenge —this post explores some of the most promising multi-system economic strategies that research universities are leading.   

Research universities’ regional economic impact depends on their relevance to surrounding industries and communities  

There is a wide body of literature documenting the positive economic impact of research universities. Regions that became home to a land grant university over a century ago have stronger economies today as a result. Increasing state funding to research universities leads to higher levels of local patenting and entrepreneurship. And for each new university patent, researchers estimate 15 additional jobs are created outside the university in the local economy. Indeed, as Daniel P. Gross and Bhaven N. Sampat write , major national research and development efforts (such as those during World War II) tend to shape the geography of American innovation via research universities.   

In a nation plagued by regional economic divides, research universities are a uniquely distributed innovation asset. Unlike innovation sector employment , high-growth startups , and venture capital , research universities are spread across the entire nation. Over 200 research universities located in all 50 states expend more than $50 million annually on research and development.   

Yet, there are limits to universities’ impact. In a comprehensive review of the literature, economists E. Jason Baron, Shawn Kantor, and Alexander Whalley offer three takeaways: “First, universities’ ability to affect their local economies solely through the supply of college graduates is limited. Second, the main channel by which universities can affect their local economies is through highly localized knowledge spillovers. Third, the literature provides little evidence that establishing a new university in the 21st century is sufficient to revitalize a lagging community and transform its economy. To help revive struggling regions, using existing nearby universities could be a far more cost-effective policy tool.”   

In other words, knowledge spillovers to surrounding firms and industries are strongest when university-generated knowledge is highly complementary to industry needs.  

Federal place-based industrial policies are linking research universities with local industry clusters and surrounding communities  

Against this backdrop, new federal programs are pushing research universities to deploy their talent and knowledge in ways that strengthen the industry clusters that surround them. Finding that knowledge-industry nexus was a central strategic exercise for the 60 finalists in the EDA’s $1 billion Build Back Better Regional Challenge (BBBRC) , which asked applicants to craft five-year strategies that invest in advanced industry clusters in ways that benefit historically excluded communities.   

Research universities played a fundamental role in the competition. [1]  Among the 60 finalist coalitions, research universities served as the quarterback organization in 12, and participated in a supporting role in another 29. Over one-third of the EDA’s investments were awarded to research universities (although many universities are passing those resources on to partners).   

How did research universities propose to use that money? In our recent report analyzing the BBBRC, we categorized cluster projects into five categories: talent development; research and commercialization; infrastructure and placemaking; entrepreneurship and capital access; and governance. While research universities are, unsurprisingly, most heavily concentrated in research (41% of overall funding) and talent development (26%), they also proposed a significant number of projects related to tailored infrastructure and innovation facilities, entrepreneurship accelerators and incubators, and regional governance.   

The BBBRC exemplifies how research universities can anchor multi-system economic strategies  

Catalyzing and growing clusters requires investing in talent, research and development, entrepreneurship, and infrastructure. But regions often struggle to marshal the fiscal, political, and institutional capacity needed to overcome fragmentation in innovation, entrepreneurship, research, workforce, and industry leadership systems and act at a multi-system scale.   

Operating at a multi-system scale requires a quarterback organization to coordinate goals, strategies, and investments across those systems. Many types of entities can play this role, but research universities are natural candidates due to their relatively large scale and critical role in fueling innovation ecosystems.  

University utilization of BBBRC dollars signifies the potential for research universities to be a fulcrum for multi-system strategies. Indeed, one-third of the research universities in the BBBRC finalist coalitions proposed multi-system strategies, meaning they proposed to lead investments in at least three of the five project categories listed above.  

For example, through the New Energy New York (NENY) coalition , Binghamton University is seeking to reorganize the Southern Tier area of upstate New York into a hub for battery manufacturing and energy storage. The university’s multi-system approach will advance the cluster’s talent pool, supply chain, and supportive physical infrastructure. And through the NENY Workforce Development Initiative, the university will partner with other coalition members in higher education to expand existing workforce development programs and develop new training curricula. This partnership will implicate many of the region’s community colleges (including State University of New York [SUNY] Corning and SUNY Broome) and other research universities (including the Rochester Institute of Technology) in reducing the cluster’s barriers to entry and cultivating a diverse pool of well-trained employees to move into its high-wage jobs.  

Binghamton University will supplement these workforce development efforts through their NENY Supply Chain Program, where they will partner with the Alliance for Manufacturing and Technology (AMT), NY-BEST, Empire State Development, New York State Energy Research and Development Authority (NYSERDA), and other coalition members and industry partners to expand and improve the cluster’s supply chain. The expansion of this supply chain will enhance the region’s demand for skilled talent in the battery sector and create high-wage jobs for participants in the Workforce Development Initiative. These initiatives will support Battery-NY, the NENY coalition’s hub of infrastructure and industry experts working to advance energy storage technology, support cluster manufacturers, and attract businesses to the region.  

Georgia Tech has also proposed operating across multiple systems to bolster advanced manufacturing across the state through the Georgia AI Manufacturing (GA-AIM) coalition. To prepare the state’s future workforce, Georgia Tech will partner with Spelman College and the Technical College System of Georgia on degree and non-degree training options in artificial intelligence. As a complement, the Georgia Tech Enterprise Innovation Institute’s Manufacturing Extension Partnership (GaMEP) will promote the adoption of AI technology among small and medium-sized enterprises in rural communities across the state, creating demand for those newly trained workers. On governance, the Enterprise Innovation Institute’s Connect to Hire program will seek to connect historically excluded communities to these talent development and innovation initiatives. Finally, Georgia Tech is investing in new physical centers to enable commercialization and startup growth.  

Further west, the University of Nebraska is a major implementation partner to Invest Nebraska in the  Heartland Robotics Cluster ’s efforts to accelerate the state’s agricultural technology sector. The Nebraska Manufacturing Extension Partnership (NM-EP) at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln’s Institute of Agriculture and Natural Resources will identify small, medium-sized, and startup manufacturers in rural and urban communities across the state and create a supply chain database connecting them to high-quality suppliers. In addition, the NM-EP will help these manufacturers integrate new robotics technologies into their existing production systems. And as part of the Heartland Robotics Cluster’s commitment to workforce development, the NM-EP’s technology adoption program will provide credentialing and certification to participating manufacturers for cooperative robotic technologies.  

In future work, we will profile the implementation of comprehensive university approaches to learn more about how these strategies play out. But these three examples suggest that several elements are necessary to work at a multi-system scale. First, universities must have existing innovation assets that industries value; in each example above, universities are working from existing strengths, not trying to build from scratch. Second, those universities need to have the staff, systems, and staying power to work with other organizations in the region, from government agencies to economic development organizations to community colleges, workforce boards, and community-based organizations. Often, this requires an entrepreneurial leader that can create and sustain strong working and personal relationships with other community leaders. And third, there typically needs to be an external funding source, such as a federal or state program, to rally regional actors around a more ambitious strategy. In this case, the BBBRC provided exactly that type of “jump-ball” funding effect.  

While multi-system approaches will not be feasible in every region, the BBBRC illustrates that when the conditions are ripe, universities, industry, and communities can pursue a more systemic approach to regional economic development.   

This report was prepared by Brookings Metro using federal funds under award ED22HDQ3070081 from the Economic Development Administration, U.S. Department of Commerce. The statements, findings, conclusions, and recommendations are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Economic Development Administration or the U.S. Department of Commerce.  

1.“Research universities” include universities that award a minimum of 20 research-based doctoral degrees and spend at least $5 million on research per academic year. Universities are categorized according to the 2021 Carnegie Classifications of Higher Education Institutions based on data collected in the National Science Foundation’s Higher Education Research and Development Survey.

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Division of Research and Economic Development

The Division of Research and Economic Development at Jackson State University is the conduit for the university’s interactions with the local community, state, nation, and the world in the area of sponsored programs.  The achievements of the university’s faculty, staff and students, along with the expertise of the university’s scholars are shared with the broader community. The Division creates, promotes and supports a research environment by helping faculty, staff and students identify opportunities and secure externally funded grants, contracts and cooperative agreements.

The Division supports the President’s Office in identifying and acquiring resources for special initiatives to advance the mission of the university.  It works in collaboration with all divisions and units to promote JSU’s vision. Administrative oversight within the Office includes the areas of Sponsored Programs, Research Compliance, Technology Transfer and Commercialization, federal congressional initiatives, and other research and development strategic initiatives.

The Division will serve as a leader in promoting excellence among all university scholars and be recognized as a model in developing multidisciplinary collaborations throughout the campus, local, national, and international communities.  To promote innovation, academic entrepreneurship and scholarly engagement, and to increase research and development, the Office will be redesigned with a focus on service to the university and its scholars.

Administrative staff will increase engagement with program officers and funding agencies, build strategic alliances and collaborations, develop a closer relationship with faculty researchers, and highlight the work of student/faculty research teams. The staff will establish a transparent pipeline of the entire proposal development and project management process, from concept development and proposal submission to project implementation and research sustainability.

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To really succeed in any area of research, you need supporters who believe in you. JSU’s Office of Research and Economic Development is here to help you with securing funding, finding opportunities, and bringing your work to the public.

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