Henry Overman

Henry Overman, BSc. (Bristol), MSc. (LSE), PhD. (LSE) is professor in Economic Geography in the Department of Geography and Environment at the London School of Economics and since September 2013, the director of the What Works Centre for Local Economic Growth.

From April 2008 to September 2013 he directed the Spatial Economics Research Centre. His current research interests include the clustering of economic activity, the evolution of cities and the causes and consequences of urban sprawl. His research on clusters and urban sprawl has been published in leading economics journals (The Review of Economics Studies and The Quarterly Journal of Economics) while his work on city size distribution and the geography of UK trade has been published in leading economic geography journals (Environment and Planning and Journal of Economic Geography). He continues to publish in journals from both disciplines. He has provided policy advice to, amongst others, the European Commission, Department for International Development, Department for Business Enterprise and Regulatory Reform, Department for Communities and Local Government and the Department for Transport. He is also affiliated with the Centre for Economic Policy Research's International Trade Programme. In 2006 he was awarded the August Loesch Prize for outstanding research in the field of Regional Science, and in 2009, he won the Geoffrey J.D. Hewings Award for distinguished contributions to Regional Science research by scholars who have recently completed doctoral studies.

His latest book is Urban Economics And Urban Policy: Challenging Conventional Policy Wisdom (Edward Elgar, 2014), with Paul Cheshire and Max Nathan

• Applied urban and regional economics

• Urban and regional economic policy 

Selected recent publications:

• P. Cheshire, M. Nathan, H. G. Overman, Urban Economics And Urban Policy: Challenging Conventional Policy Wisdom, London, Edward Elgar, 2014 [ISBN: 978 1 78195 251 1 / 978 1 78195 252 8 (ebook)]

• Giulia Faggio, Henry Overman, The effect of public sector employment on local labour markets, Journal of Urban Economics, Available online 31 May 2013, ISSN 0094-1190

• Gibbons, Stephen and Overman, Henry G. (2012) Mostly pointless spatial econometrics. Journal of regional science, 52 (2). pp. 172-191. ISSN 0022-4146

• Overman, Henry G. and Gibbons, Stephen (2011) Unequal Britain: how real are regional disparities? Centrepiece, 17 (1). pp. 23-25. ISSN 1362-3761

• Duranton, Gilles and Gobillon, Laurent and Overman, Henry G. (2011) Assessing the effects of local taxation using microgeographic data. The economic journal, 121 (555). pp. 1017-1046. ISSN 0013-0133

• Overman, Henry G. and Rice, Patricia and Venables, Anthony J. (2010) Economic linkages across space. Regional studies, 44 (1). pp. 17-33. ISSN 0034-3404

• Overman, Henry G. (2010) Gis a job: what use geographical information systems in spatial economics. Journal of regional science, 50 (1). pp. 165-180. ISSN 0022-4146

• Wrigley, N. and Overman, Henry G. (2010) The 10th year of the Journal of Economic Geography: a decade of high impact publication. Journal of economic geography, 10 (1). pp. 1-8. ISSN 1468-2702

• Overman, Henry G. and Puga, Diego and Turner, Matthew A. (2008) Decomposing the growth in residential land in the United States. Regional science and urban economics, 38 (5). pp. 487-497. ISSN 0166-0462

• Ioannides, Yannis Menelaos and Overman, Henry G. and Rossi-Hansberg, Esteban and Schmidheiny, Kurt (2008) The effect of information and communication technologies on urban structure. Economic policy, 23 (54). pp. 201-242. ISSN 0266-4658

• Eid, Jean and Overman, Henry G. and Puga, Diego and Turner, Matthew A. (2008) Fat city: questioning the relationship between urban sprawl and obesity. Journal of urban economics, 63 (2). pp. 385-404. ISSN 0094-1190

• Duranton, Gilles and Overman, Henry G. (2008) Exploring the detailed location patterns of UK manufacturing industries using microgeographic data. Journal of regional science, 48 (1). pp. 213-243. ISSN 0022-4146