He was appointed as Chair of the Council of Economic Advisors to the UK Chancellor of the Exchequer, Rachel Reeves, on 5 July 2024.
[2] He is the son of Lionel Van Reenen, formerly a sociologist at Goldsmiths College in the University of London and an immigrant from South Africa.
He completed his PhD at University College London (UCL) and began his career in 1992 at the Institute for Fiscal Studies, where he founded the 'Productivity and Innovation' programme.
From 2001 to 2002 he was a partner of an economic consultancy firm, Lexecon, now part of Charles River Associates, and was also involved in the software start-up Polygnostics.
In 2013 he published a report and book, Investing for Prosperity, written with Tim Besley, which summarised the work of the LSE Growth Commission.
More recently, he has worked on the measurement of management practices and their impact on productivity across firms and countries with his former PhD students Nicholas Bloom and Raffaella Sadun.
Van Reenen was appointed Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) in the 2016 New Year Honours for services to economics and public policy making.