John Van Reenen is Professor of Economics at the London School of Economics and Director of the Centre of Economic Performance. He is the winner of the 2009 Yrjö Jahnsson Award (European equivalent to the Bates Clark Medal)

He has been a senior policy advisor to 10 Downing Street, the UK Secretary of State for Health and European Commission. He is a Research Fellow at the CEPR and NBER.
He received his BA from the University of Cambridge, his MSc from the London School of Economics and his PhD from University College London. Since 2003 he has been a member of the economics faculty of LSE, where he has taught industrial economics, labour economics and econometrics. He has been a Research Fellow at the Institute for Fiscal Studies, a visiting Professor at the University of California at Berkeley, at Princeton and Denning Visiting Professor of Global Business and Economics at Stanford.

He joined IZA as a Research Fellow in July 2010.