Overview
Industrial policy is back on mainstream policy agendas in the U.S., Europe, and many developing countries, but the knowledge base to guide industrial policy remains underdeveloped. This conference on “New Thinking in Industrial Policy: Perspectives from Developed and Developing Countries” will convene leading researchers from economics, sociology, political science, and related fields to take stock of what is known and what needs to be learned about the optimal design of industrial policy, the challenges in evaluating interventions empirically, and the difficulties that practitioners face on the ground. The conference will be hosted by the Initiative for Policy Dialogue (IPD), the Firms & Industrial Policy Idea Lab of the Center for Political Economy (CPE), the Center for Development Economics and Policy (CDEP), and the Institute of Global Politics (IGP) on Nov. 6-7, 2025, at Columbia. It follows the successful 1st and 2nd meetings in the series in Nov. 2023 and Nov. 2024.
The submission deadline is Fri. Sept. 12, 2025 at 11:59pm ET. Papers should be submitted at this link (Gmail sign-in required). We are willing to consider extended abstracts as well as complete papers. We expect to post the program by Fri. Oct. 3, 2025. This is the main conference page.
The academic committee for the event is: Laura Boudreau (Columbia University), Bilge Erten (Northeastern University), Martin Guzman (Columbia University), Susan Helper (Case Western Reserve University), Luis Jaramillo (Columbia University), Nils Kupzok (Columbia University), Filip Milosavljevic (Columbia University), Nathan Lane (Oxford University), Andrew Schrank (Brown University), Joseph Stiglitz (Columbia University), Eric Verhoogen (Columbia University), and Josh Whitford (Columbia University).
The conference will cover two nights’ hotel accommodation and reasonable travel costs (economy class for flights) for speakers.
If you have questions, please contact Olena Jennings of CDEP at omj2101@columbia.edu.