Nathan Lane headshot

Nathan Lane

Fellow, Industrial Policy and Trade

He/Him

As a fellow at the Roosevelt Institute, Nathan Lane investigates what metrics and criteria can help guide the selection of industries for industrial policy support, as well as what modalities of economic intervention in markets have the firmest empirical support.


Nathan Lane is an associate professor in economics at University of Oxford, and a tutorial fellow at Merton College, Oxford. With Professor Reka Juhasz (UBC), he is co-founder of the Industrial Policy Group, which focuses on the empirical evaluation and measurement of industrial policies. His interests are at the intersection of political economy, industrial development, comparative historical development, and big data. His current research focuses on establishing basic facts surrounding industrial policy practice.

Prior to teaching at Oxford, Nathan was an economics professor at Monash University, where he was cofounder of SodaLabs.io. Previously, he was a postdoctoral researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a visiting fellow at Harvard University. He has served as a researcher at the National Bureau of Economic Research, at Columbia University’s Center for Research on Environmental Decisions, and at other institutes.

Nathan has also given expert advice on World Trade Organization reports and spoken on the subject of industrial policy with development banks around the world such as the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development and the World Bank. His writing on industrial policy has appeared in the Boston Review, VoxDev, and beyond.

Nathan received his PhD in economics from the Institute for International Economic Studies at Stockholm University, his Master’s from Columbia University, and his Bachelor’s from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. He has authored or coauthored numerous articles and papers, including “Manufacturing Revolutions: Industrial Policy and Industrialization in South Korea” (2022), “The Who, What, When, and How of Industrial Policy: A Text-Based Approach” (2022), “The New Empirics of Industrial Policy” (Journal of Industry, Competition and Trade 2020), and “The Historical State, Local Collective Action, and Economic Development in Vietnam” (Econometrica 2018).