Jon Hartley and Luis Garicano discuss Luis’s career, including his time as a Member of the European Parliament (MEP) from 2019 to 2022, his research on firms, Europe’s struggles with innovation and regulation, and the future of the euro.

Recorded on December 22, 2025.

ABOUT THE SPEAKERS:

Luis Garicano is a full professor at the London School of Economics, School of Public Policy. His research focuses on the impact of organization and technology on aggregate economic variables like wage distribution, productivity, or economic growth. He has studied why organizations and institutions fail and how to better design them. He has also studied how specific digital technologies are transforming the economy. His more recent research has studied how to build better institutions in Europe to avoid a new economic crisis in the Eurozone.

From 2019-22, Garicano stepped out of academia and became a Member of the European Parliament (MEP).  While in Parliament he was a vice president of the Renew Europe Group in Parliament in charge of economic affairs and a vice president of the European political party,  Alliance of Liberals and Democrats for Europe (ALDE Party). 

Jon Hartley is currently a Policy Fellow at the Hoover Institution, an economics PhD Candidate at Stanford University, a Research Fellow at the UT-Austin Civitas Institute, a Senior Fellow at the Foundation for Research on Equal Opportunity (FREOPP), a Senior Fellow at the Macdonald-Laurier Institute, and an Affiliated Scholar at the Mercatus Center. Jon also is the host of the Capitalism and Freedom in the 21st Century Podcast, an official podcast of the Hoover Institution, a member of the Canadian Group of Economists, and the chair of the Economic Club of Miami.

Jon has previously worked at Goldman Sachs Asset Management as a Fixed Income Portfolio Construction and Risk Management Associate and as a Quantitative Investment Strategies Client Portfolio Management Senior Analyst and in various policy/governmental roles at the World Bank, IMF, Committee on Capital Markets Regulation, U.S. Congress Joint Economic Committee, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago, and the Bank of Canada

Jon has also been a regular economics contributor for National Review Online, Forbes and The Huffington Post and has contributed to The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, USA Today, Globe and Mail, National Post, and Toronto Star among other outlets. Jon has also appeared on CNBC, Fox BusinessFox News, Bloomberg, and NBC and was named to the 2017 Forbes 30 Under 30 Law & Policy list, the 2017 Wharton 40 Under 40 list and was previously a World Economic Forum Global Shaper

ABOUT THE SERIES:

Each episode of Capitalism and Freedom in the 21st Century, a video podcast series and the official podcast of the Hoover Economic Policy Working Group, focuses on getting into the weeds of economics, finance, and public policy on important current topics through one-on-one interviews. Host Jon Hartley asks guests about their main ideas and contributions to academic research and policy. The podcast is titled after Milton Friedman‘s famous 1962 bestselling book Capitalism and Freedom, which after 60 years, remains prescient from its focus on various topics which are now at the forefront of economic debates, such as monetary policy and inflation, fiscal policy, occupational licensing, education vouchers, income share agreements, the distribution of income, and negative income taxes, among many other topics.

For more information, visit: capitalismandfreedom.substack.com/

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