In the beginning of his career, Jones's research was focused on innovation, national leadership, and economic growth. Towards the late 2000s, his research expanded to consider how factors like climate and education impact the wealth and poverty of nations. The relationship between age and breakthrough innovations is another recurring topic in his research.
Burden of knowledge In 2005, in a paper entitled 'The Burden of Knowledge and the 'Death of the Renaissance Man': Is Innovation Getting Harder?', Jones presented the Burden of Knowledge theory. This theory considers what happens if the advance of scientific and technological knowledge imposes an increasing educational burden on successive generations of innovators. This theory has been used to explain numerous shifts in the nature of innovation, including the rising age at which scientists and inventors make major contributions, rising specialization and teamwork in science and invention, and the increasing difficulty of advancing productivity growth in the economy.
Impact of climate on economic development Another strand of Jones's research deals with the relationship between temperature and economic development (and the direction of the relationship's causality). In this research, together with
Benjamin Olken and
Melissa Dell, Jones found that higher temperatures severely reduce economic growth in developing countries, lowering both agricultural and industrial output and provoking political instability, thus overall suggesting large negative impacts of higher temperatures on developing countries. These conclusions have been challenged as relying on "an untenable method of classifying countries by income." Furthermore, in other work, Dell, Jones and Olken also found that a large part of the strongly negative impact of high temperatures on income may be offset by adaptation in the long run. These and other results are summarized and discussed in these authors' highly cited review of the
economics of climate change, What Do We Learn from the Weather?
Human capital and economic development Jones's research has also focused on the role of
human capital in explaining the wealth and poverty of nations. His work has disrupted a prior consensus, where researchers had concluded that human capital was of minor importance, and shown instead that human capital differences may explain several phenomena in world economy, including large portions of the vast gap in per-capita income between rich and poor countries. == Personal life ==