Pierre Mohnen is Professor of the Microeconometrics of Technical Change at the Faculty of Economics and Business Administration of Maastricht University and Professorial Fellow at the UNU Maastricht Economic and Social Research Institute on Innovation and Technology (UNU-MERIT).
He has an M.A. in economics from the Catholic University of Louvain and a Ph.D. in economics from New York University. He was Professor of Economics at the University of Quebec in Montreal (UQAM) from 1984 to 2001, where he still holds an adjunct professor position. He has been a Visiting Professor at the Universities of Paris I, Lyon II, Hong Kong, at the École Nationale de la Statistique et de l'Administration Économique (ENSAE), and a Visiting Researcher at CentER (Tilburg University), Centre de Recherche en Économie et Statistique (CREST), and Wissenschaftszentrum Berlin (WZB). Pierre Mohnen is also a Fellow at CIRANO, the Center for Interuniversity Research and the Analysis on Organizations.
His research areas are the economics of production, applied econometrics, productivity and innovation. In the past he has estimated private and social rates of return on R&D, compared productivity performances across countries, in particular the role of R&D, investigated the determinants of innovation, of the proximity between private and public research institutions, and of total factor productivity growth. On the policy side, he does work on the effectiveness of R&D tax incentives and of direct support measures towards innovation. He is presently working on projects relating to structural models linking R&D to productivity via innovations, linking competition and productivity, complementarities in innovation policies, the economics of intellectual property rights, and the estimation of informational rents in public contracts.