Jan Eeckhout

Jan Eeckhout is a Belgian economist. He is an ICREA Research Professor at Pompeu Fabra University (UPF) and at the Barcelona School of Economics. Eeckhout is known for his research on the macroeconomic implications of market power, as well as his contributions to the economics of labor markets. He served as President of the European Economic Association in 2024 and is a Fellow of the Econometric Society and a Member of the Academia Europaea.

Education Eeckhout obtained a degree in Engineering and Economics from KU Leuven in 1992 and a Master of Arts in Economics from the University of Manchester in 1993. He earned his PhD in Economics from the London School of Economics (LSE) in 1998.

Career Eeckhout began his academic career as a Lecturer in Economics at the London School of Economics in 1996–1997. He joined the Department of Economics at Pompeu Fabra University (UPF) in 1997 and held a Marie Curie Fellowship there in 1998–1999.

Between 2011 and 2019, Eeckhout was Professor of Economics at University College London. He returned to UPF as an ICREA Research Professor in 2008, a position he continues to hold, and since 2019 he has also been a research professor at the Barcelona School of Economics.

Eeckhout served as president of the European Economic Association in 2024 and is a member of the executive committee and council of the Econometric Society. He is also a research fellow at the Centre for Economic Policy Research, an associate researcher at the Centre de Recerca en Economia Internacional (CREI), and a research associate at the Institute for Fiscal Studies. the Journal of Economic Theory, and the Journal of the European Economic Association. He was chair of the European Research Council Consolidator Grant panel in 2024.

Research Eeckhout’s research lies at the intersection of macroeconomics, labor economics, and industrial organization, combining theoretical models with empirical analysis to examine market power, assortative matching, and urban economics. A central strand of his work documents the rise of market power in the global economy and its macroeconomic implications. In The Rise of Market Power and the Macroeconomic Implications (2020), co-authored with Jan De Loecker and Gabriel Unger, he uses firm-level data to show that aggregate markups in the United States have increased substantially since 1980, a development linked to declining labor shares of income, reduced labor market dynamism, and stagnant wages for low-skilled workers. These themes are synthesized for a broader audience in his book The Profit Paradox: How Thriving Firms Threaten the Future of Work (2021), which argues that highly productive firms adopt new technologies efficiently but use their market power to limit competition and exert monopsony power in labor markets, leading to higher consumer prices, lower wages, and increased economic inequality. In urban economics, his work on city size distributions is widely cited. His 2004 article in the American Economic Review provides empirical support for Gibrat's law for cities, showing that city growth rates are independent of initial size and generate a log-normal distribution of city sizes across the entire urban system, rather than only in the upper tail described by Zipf's law.

Awards and honors Kravis Award, University of Pennsylvania, 2002 and 2005 Fellow of the European Economic Association, elected 2012 Member of the Academia Europaea, elected 2014 Fellow of the Econometric Society, elected 2019 William G. Bowen Book Award, Princeton University, 2021 ERC Advanced Grant, 2024 King Jaume I Award, 2025

Selected publications

“Gibrat’s Law for (All) Cities,” American Economic Review, 2004. “Identifying Sorting—In Theory” (with P. Kircher), Review of Economic Studies, 2011. “Spatial Sorting” (with R. Pinheiro and K. Schmidheiny), Journal of Political Economy, 2014. “Global Market Power” (with J. De Loecker), National Bureau of Economic Research. “The Rise of Market Power and the Macroeconomic Implications” (with J. De Loecker and G. Unger), Quarterly Journal of Economics, 2020. The Profit Paradox: How Thriving Firms Threaten the Future of Work (Princeton University Press, 2021). Translated into Spanish, Italian, Chinese, Korean, Dutch, Catalan, Persian, and Japanese.