About

Benjamin F. Jones is the Gordon and Llura Gund Family Professor of Entrepreneurship and Professor of Strategy at Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern University, where he also co-directs the Ryan Institute on Complexity. An economist by training, his research focuses on the sources of economic growth in advanced economies, emphasizing innovation, entrepreneurship, and scientific progress. He studies global economic development, including the roles of education, climate, and national leadership in explaining the wealth and poverty of nations. His work has been published in prominent journals such as the American Economic Review, Science, and Nature, and has been profiled in media outlets including the Wall Street Journal, the Economist, and The New Yorker. Professor Jones has served as the senior economist for macroeconomics for the White House Council of Economic Advisers and in the U.S. Department of the Treasury. He is a non-resident senior fellow of the Brookings Institution, a research associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research where he co-directs the Innovation Policy Working Group, a senior fellow of the Institute for Progress, and a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. His academic positions include being the Gund Family Professor of Entrepreneurship and Professor of Strategy at Kellogg since 2014, and previously serving as an associate professor and assistant professor at Northwestern University. His professional experience also includes roles as a senior economist for macroeconomics at the White House and as a special assistant to the Deputy Secretary at the U.S. Department of the Treasury. His awards include the L.G. Lavengood Outstanding Professor of the Year Award and the Sidney J. Levy Award for Excellence in Teaching, among others.

Research topics

• Sociology
• Political Science
• Business
• Finance
• Economics
• Gender studies
• Demography
• Psychology
• Social psychology
• Marketing
• Management
• Demographic economics

Selected publications

• Open Collaborative Investment Partnerships (OCIP): The Evolution of Outsourced Investing

  The Journal of Portfolio Management · 2026-04-03

  article

  The outsourced chief investment officer (OCIO) model has expanded rapidly alongside rising market complexity, private markets mainstreaming, and growing governance constraints for asset owners. Yet the prevailing choice between narrow, single-asset mandates and fully delegated OCIO arrangements often misaligns with how many institutions prefer to operate. This article formalizes Open Collaborative Investment Partnerships (OCIP) as a distinct, owner-led engagement model that embeds external capabilities while preserving policy control, transparency, and flexibility. OCIP occupies the collaborative middle ground between consulting and delegation. Partners contribute research, implementation, and specialized expertise within clearly defined guardrails, while owners retain veto rights, oversight, and responsibility for total portfolio decisions. We position OCIP relative to OCIO, document secular drivers of OCIP-type engagements, and illustrate the model through practical examples. We also outline a blueprint for effective collaboration—emphasizing clarity, structured interaction, open architecture, and mutual transparency. OCIP reframes the asset owner–manager relationship around co-production and outcome alignment, enabling institutions to enhance capability without relinquishing governance control.

  PublisherDOI

• The pivot penalty in research

  Nature · 2025-05-28 · 26 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  Scientists and inventors set the direction of their work amid evolving questions, opportunities and challenges, yet the understanding of pivots between research areas and their outcomes remains limited1–5. Theories of creative search highlight the potential benefits of exploration but also emphasize difficulties in moving beyond one’s expertise6–14. Here we introduce a measurement framework to quantify how far researchers move from their existing work, and apply it to millions of papers and patents. We find a pervasive ‘pivot penalty’, in which the impact of new research steeply declines the further a researcher moves from their previous work. The pivot penalty applies nearly universally across science and patenting, and has been growing in magnitude over the past five decades. Larger pivots further exhibit weak engagement with established mixtures of prior knowledge, lower publication success rates and less market impact. Unexpected shocks to the research landscape, which may push researchers away from existing areas or pull them into new ones, further demonstrate substantial pivot penalties, including in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic. The pivot penalty generalizes across fields, career stage, productivity, collaboration and funding contexts, highlighting both the breadth and depth of the adaptive challenge. Overall, the findings point to large and increasing challenges in effectively adapting to new opportunities and threats, with implications for individual researchers, research organizations, science policy and the capacity of science and society as a whole to confront emergent demands. An analysis of millions of scientific papers and patents reveals a ‘pivot penalty’ when researchers shift direction, with the impact of studies decreasing rapidly the further they move from their previous work.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Tenure and research trajectories

  Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences · 2025-07-22 · 8 citations

  articleOpen accessCorresponding

  Tenure is a cornerstone of the US academic system, yet its relationship to faculty research trajectories remains poorly understood. Conceptually, tenure systems may act as a selection mechanism, screening in high-output researchers; a dynamic incentive mechanism, encouraging high output prior to tenure but low output after tenure; and a creative search mechanism, encouraging tenured individuals to undertake high-risk work. Here, we integrate data from seven different sources to trace US tenure-line faculty and their research outputs at a remarkable scale and scope, covering over 12,000 researchers across 15 disciplines. Our analysis reveals that faculty publication rates typically increase sharply during the tenure track and peak just before obtaining tenure. Post-tenure trends, however, vary across disciplines: In lab-based fields, such as biology and chemistry, research output typically remains high post-tenure, whereas in non-lab-based fields, such as mathematics and sociology, research output typically declines substantially post-tenure. Turning to creative search, faculty increasingly produce novel, high-risk research after securing tenure. However, this shift toward novelty and risk-taking comes with a decline in impact, with post-tenure research yielding fewer highly cited papers. Comparing outcomes across common career ages but different tenure years or comparing research trajectories in tenure-based and non-tenure-based research settings underscores that breaks in the research trajectories are sharply tied to the individual's tenure year. Overall, these findings provide an empirical basis for understanding the tenure system, individual research trajectories, and the shape of scientific output.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Funding the Frontier: Visualizing the Broad Impact of Science and Science Funding

  ArXiv.org · 2025-09-19

  preprintOpen access

  Understanding the broad impact of science and science funding is critical to ensuring that science investments and policies align with societal needs. Existing research links science funding to the output of scientific publications but largely leaves out the downstream uses of science and the myriad ways in which investing in science may impact human society. As funders seek to allocate scarce funding resources across a complex research landscape, there is an urgent need for informative and transparent tools that allow for comprehensive assessments and visualization of the impact of funding. Here we present Funding the Frontier (FtF), a visual analysis system for researchers, funders, policymakers, university leaders, and the broad public to analyze multidimensional impacts of funding and make informed decisions regarding research investments and opportunities. The system is built on a massive data collection that connects 7M research grants to 140M scientific publications, 160M patents, 10.9M policy documents, 800K clinical trials, and 5.8M newsfeeds, with 1.8B citation linkages among these entities, systematically linking science funding to its downstream impacts. As such, Funding the Frontier is distinguished by its multifaceted impact analysis framework. The system incorporates diverse impact metrics and predictive models that forecast future investment opportunities into an array of coordinated views, allowing for easy exploration of funding and its outcomes. We evaluate the effectiveness and usability of the system using case studies and expert interviews. Feedback suggests that our system not only fulfills the primary analysis needs of its target users, but the rich datasets of the complex science ecosystem and the proposed analysis framework also open new avenues for both visualization and the science of science research.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Artificial Intelligence in Research and Development

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2025-01-01

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• A Khovanov Laplacian and Khovanov Dirac for Knots and Links

  arXiv (Cornell University) · 2024-11-28 · 1 citations

  preprintOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Khovanov homology has been the subject of much study in knot theory and low dimensional topology since 2000. This work introduces a Khovanov Laplacian and a Khovanov Dirac to study knot and link diagrams. The harmonic spectrum of the Khovanov Laplacian or the Khovanov Dirac retains the topological invariants of Khovanov homology, while their non-harmonic spectra reveal additional information that is distinct from Khovanov homology.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• A Framework for Economic Growth with Capital-Embodied Technical Change

  American Economic Review · 2024-04-30 · 21 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Technological advance is often embodied in capital inputs, like computers, airplanes, and robots. This paper builds a framework where capital inputs advance through (i) increased automation and (ii) increased productivity. The interplay of these two innovation dimensions can produce balanced growth, satisfying the Uzawa Growth Theorem even though technological progress is capital-embodied. The framework can further address structural transformation, general-purpose technologies, the limited macroeconomic impact of computing, and declining productivity growth and labor shares. Overall, this tractable framework can help resolve puzzling tensions between micro-level observations of innovation and balanced growth while providing new perspectives on numerous macroeconomic phenomena. (JEL E22, E23, E24, E25, L16, O33, O41)

  PublisherDOI

• Tenure and Research Trajectories

  arXiv (Cornell University) · 2024-11-15 · 1 citations

  preprintOpen access

  Tenure is a cornerstone of the US academic system, yet its relationship to faculty research trajectories remains poorly understood. Conceptually, tenure systems may act as a selection mechanism, screening in high-output researchers; a dynamic incentive mechanism, encouraging high output prior to tenure but low output after tenure; and a creative search mechanism, encouraging tenured individuals to undertake high-risk work. Here, we integrate data from seven different sources to trace US tenure-line faculty and their research outputs at an unprecedented scale and scope, covering over 12,000 researchers across 15 disciplines. Our analysis reveals that faculty publication rates typically increase sharply during the tenure track and peak just before obtaining tenure. Post-tenure trends, however, vary across disciplines: in lab-based fields, such as biology and chemistry, research output typically remains high post-tenure, whereas in non-lab-based fields, such as mathematics and sociology, research output typically declines substantially post-tenure. Turning to creative search, faculty increasingly produce novel, high-risk research after securing tenure. However, this shift toward novelty and risk-taking comes with a decline in impact, with post-tenure research yielding fewer highly cited papers. Comparing outcomes across common career ages but different tenure years or comparing research trajectories in tenure-based and non-tenure-based research settings underscores that breaks in the research trajectories are sharply tied to the individual's tenure year. Overall, these findings provide a new empirical basis for understanding the tenure system, individual research trajectories, and the shape of scientific output.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Data, measurement and empirical methods in the science of science

  Nature Human Behaviour · 2023-06-01 · 102 citations

  reviewOpen access
  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Gender-diverse teams produce more novel and higher-impact scientific ideas

  Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences · 2022 · 334 citations

  • Political Science
  • Sociology
  • Psychology

  Science's changing demographics raise new questions about research team diversity and research outcomes. We study mixed-gender research teams, examining 6.6 million papers published across the medical sciences since 2000 and establishing several core findings. First, the fraction of publications by mixed-gender teams has grown rapidly, yet mixed-gender teams continue to be underrepresented compared to the expectations of a null model. Second, despite their underrepresentation, the publications of mixed-gender teams are substantially more novel and impactful than the publications of same-gender teams of equivalent size. Third, the greater the gender balance on a team, the better the team scores on these performance measures. Fourth, these patterns generalize across medical subfields. Finally, the novelty and impact advantages seen with mixed-gender teams persist when considering numerous controls and potential related features, including fixed effects for the individual researchers, team structures, and network positioning, suggesting that a team's gender balance is an underrecognized yet powerful correlate of novel and impactful scientific discoveries.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Benjamin Olken

  34 shared

• Brian Uzzi

  McCormick (United States)

  29 shared

• Pierre Azoulay

  26 shared

• Dashun Wang

  Northwestern University

  24 shared

• Javier Miranda

  21 shared

• J. Daniel Kim

  National Bureau of Economic Research

  16 shared

• Yian Yin

  Cornell University

  14 shared

• Stefan Wuchty

  University of Miami

  13 shared

Awards & honors

• L.G. Lavengood Outstanding Professor of the Year Award, 2023…
• Sidney J. Levy Award for Excellence in Teaching
• AER: Insights Excellence in Refereeing Award, American Econo…
• Sidney J. Levy Teaching Award
• Excellence in Refereeing Award, American Economic Review