Panmure House Prize 2024 Winner Public Lecture

Beyond the Invisible Hand: Immaterial Inputs to Economic Growth

“Unexpected intellectual collaborations and friendships that you didn’t plan in advance lead to the greatest explosions of new knowledge generation and innovation,” notes Professor Doran. “It’s when innovative people bump into each other randomly and then start hanging out with each other all the time – and talking about dozens of different topics – that they can stumble across something stellar.”

About the Panmure House Prize

The Panmure House Prize is an annual award of US$75,000 for research that explores the relationship between long-term thinking and radical innovation. The Prize is awarded to emerging leaders in academia and enables research that embodies Adam Smith's own approach to rigorous empiricism and long-term, inter-disciplinary thinking.

The Prize is open to academics in and across all disciplines whose nominations are shortlisted and judged by our specially appointed Panmure House Prize Panel. The Prize is administrated in partnership with FCLTGlobal, and supported by Baillie Gifford.

The 2024 Prize was awarded to Professor Kirk Doran, Associate Professor of Economics at the University of Notre Dame.

About the Speaker

Kirk Doran is an Associate Professor of Economics at the University of Notre Dame. Doran received his B.A. in Physics from Harvard University in 2002, his S.M. in Applied Mathematics from Harvard University in 2002, and his Ph.D. in Economics from Princeton University in 2008, where his dissertation won Princeton's labor economics dissertation award.

Doran's research focuses on issues in labor economics, innovation economics, and international migration, with a particular focus on human capital complementarities. His work has examined the implications of large migrations of top scientists on the productivity and knowledge generation of their peers.

Recent work has focused on the role of externalities, collaboration, and geographic distance in knowledge production, the impact of top prizes on the intellectual content of their recipient's work, and the impact of highly skilled immigrants on firms which randomly receive them. Professor Doran's research has been published in the Quarterly Journal of Economics, the Journal of Political Economy, the Review of Economics and Statistics, the Journal of Labor Economics, and the Journal of Human Resources, among others, and has been funded by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, the Upjohn Institute, and the Kauffman Foundation.

The Event

This exclusive event includes a keynote lecture and audience Q&A, followed by a canapé and drinks reception in the Interpretation Suite.