Welcome to the LSE Events podcast by the London School of Economics and Political Science.
Get ready to hear from some of the most influential international figures in the social sciences.
Good evening.
It's my great pleasure to welcome you all to LSE for this hybrid event.
My name is Nava Ashrafa and I'm Professor of Economics at the LSE and Director of the Altruistic Capital Lab.
This event that we are in today is part of our inaugural lecture series at the LSE which honors the professors from across the school.
These events are a special moment in an academic's career as it marks
that they've now been promoted to professor or have recently joined the school.
This is a way in which we can all celebrate the success of our community and I can't imagine a better person to bring us into this 2025 inaugural lecture series than Xavier Gervais.
Xavier Gervais is a professor of economics at the LSE.
His research explores innovation, inflation and inequality with related methodological work in applied econometrics.
He serves as a member of the French Council of Economic Analysis and Independent Advisory Board to the French Prime Minister.
His contributions have been widely recognized,
earning him the 2019 Philip Leverhume Prize and the 2021 Prize for the best French economist under 40.
He's also a co-editor of the American Economic Journal Applied Economics.
And according to REPEC, he is the most cited economist whose first publication appeared in the last 10 years.
So you can see how excited we are to have the inaugural series with him.
Xavier will be talking tonight about how innovation is increasingly monopolized by a small entrepreneurial elite that is not representative of the population at all.
It's urgent to involve everyone, especially women and people of underprivileged backgrounds,
in the innovation process, from the creation of technologies to their widespread dissemination.