Biography 

Mika Maliranta has served as Director of the Labour Institute for Economic Research LABORE since 2021. He leads an independent, 25-person research institute that studies labour markets and the economy and produces economic forecasts. Alongside the directorship, Mika is a part-time Professor of Economics at the Turku School of Economics, University of Turku. He has previously worked as Research Professor at the Finnish Competition and Consumer Authority, as Research Director and Head of Unit at the Research Institute of the Finnish Economy (ETLA), and as a part-time professor at the University of Jyväskylä. At Statistics Finland he founded and led (2001–2003) the Research Laboratory that opened Finnish register microdata to external researchers.

Mika received his doctorate in economics from the Helsinki School of Economics (now Aalto University) in 2003. His research focuses on productivity, creative destruction and firm dynamics, the functioning of labour markets and wage formation, and cost competitiveness. The work builds on Finnish linked employer–employee register data, and he has developed statistical methods for measuring the micro-level sources of productivity growth. He has published more than 35 peer-reviewed articles in international journals, including Economica, Research Policy, Journal of Economic Geography, Oxford Economic Papers and the Journal of Population Economics.

Mika works actively at the interface of research and economic policy. He is Vice Chair of the Finnish Council of Regulatory Impact Analysis, a member of the Finnish Productivity Board and Chair of the Bureau of the OECD Working Party on Industry Analysis, and he served on the expert group of the Prime Minister’s Room for Growth project (2024–2025). He is also Editor-in-Chief of Talous & Yhteiskunta, a journal published by Labore, and a member of the editorial board of the Finnish Economic Journal (Kansantaloudellinen aikakauskirja).

Mika is an active voice in Finnish public debate who popularises economics in writing, in the media and in podcasts. His book Pinnan alta (Docendo, 2024) discusses the sources of economic growth, and he has long co-hosted a podcast on economics with Matti Apunen.