Economic Geography and Spatial Economics

The Economic Geography and Spatial Economics seminar series brings together scholars who work at the intersection between spatial and urban economics and the more institutionally-oriented fields of economic geography.

Irrespective of the specific methodological approach, research presented in the series is anchored in a shared culture and core research values, which place strong emphasis on theoretically-informed, policy-relevant and evidence-based research.

Some of the seminars are co-hosted by the Department of Geography and Environment and the Centre for Economic Performance.

The series is organised by Dr Carolin Hulke, Dr Elena Renzullo, Dr Felipe Carozzi, Prof Riccardo Crescenzi and Prof Olmo Silva.

Unless otherwise noted, the seminars take place at 12.30-2pm in CKK 3.15.

If you wish to attend any of the seminars, please email geog.research@lse.ac.uk.

Winter Term 2026

Thursday 5 February 
Carlo Menon (OECD)
'What drives regional productivity differentials? Evidence from firm-level data in Spain and Italy'

In both Italy and Spain, as in many other countries, there is a large and persistent productivity gap between less and more developed regions. The underlying drivers of these gaps can reflect many different factors. This paper leverages balance-sheet microdata to identify those drivers in the case of Italy and Spain, drawing lessons applicable across the OECD. Whilst sectoral composition accounts for one-quarter of the observed gap in both countries, the remainder is attributable to a 20-30% multifactor productivity (MFP) penalty affecting firms in less developed regions (LDRs), which persists across sectors, firm sizes and age classes. There is no evidence of weaker market selection leading to an overrepresentation of low-productivity firms in LDRs, as the average gap is best explained by a parallel shift in the productivity distribution. Compared to developed regions in the same country, Italian LDRs have a larger gap in capital per employee and in average firm size than Spanish LDRs. The findings may reflect differences in centralised wage bargaining, as well as a larger gap for Italian LDRs in access to finance and in institutional quality.

Thursday 12 February
Nicolas Gendron-Carrier (McGill University)
'Residential Human Capital and Economic Spillovers'

Abstract: We estimate human capital and economic spillovers between residential neighbours at a fine spatial scale. Our investigation uses administrative matched employer-employee data from Canada with detailed geographic identifiers for place of residence. Our empirical framework allows for the recovery of causal effects of neighbourhood demographic environments on residents' labour market outcomes. We examine heterogeneous responses by age, gender, family composition, country of origin, estimated worker quality, and spatial distance. We also characterize the magnitudes by which lower-income neighbours impart costs or confer benefits on their higher-income counterparts, the extent to which more disadvantaged neighbours benefit from various neighbourhood demographic compositions, and dynamics in these externalities. Identification relies on comparing outcomes of incumbent residents in postal codes near newly arrived households with variation in human capital, as measured by time-invariant individual-specific components of wages. As in Bayer et al. (2008), our approach exploits the local thinness of housing markets to obtain quasi-experimental variation in neighbourhood composition.

Thursday 19 February 
Neave O'Clery (UCL)
'Deciphering the global production network from cross-border firm transactions'

Abstract: Critical for policy-making and business operations, the study of global supply chains has been severely hampered by a lack of detailed data. Here we harness international firm-level transaction data covering 20m global firms, and 1 billion cross-border transactions, to infer key inputs for over 1200 products. Transforming this data to a directed network, we find that products are clustered into three large groups including textiles, chemicals and food, and machinery and metals. European industrial nations and China dominate critical intermediate products such as metals, common components and tools, while industrial complexity is highly correlated with embeddedness in densely connected supply chains. We find structural similarities with AIPNET, a product network generated via LLM queries, and strong linkages between products identified in manually-mapped electric vehicle battery and semiconductor supply chains. Finally, both forward and backward linkages are predictive of country-product diversification patterns, with stronger overall evidence for backward (upstream) linkages.

Thursday 5 March
Matthew Freedman (University of California, Irvine)
'The Direct and Local Spillover Effects of Subsidized Housing Investment: Evidence from a Tax Credit Lottery'

Abstract: This paper examines the private response to tax incentives for residential investment as well as the nature and scope of housing externalities by exploiting the lottery structure of Missouri's Neighborhood Preservation Act (NPA). The NPA offers tax credits to homeowners and developers who improve or expand the owner-occupied housing stock in low-income areas. Taking advantage of the random assignment of NPA tax credits together with detailed property-level data, we find that the program increases construction activity over and above that which would have occurred in its absence. NPA-induced investments also translate into positive albeit imprecisely measured changes in property values. However, we find no evidence that NPA-subsidized investment affects neighbors' investment behavior or nearby property values. The results highlight the limits of housing improvement policies in spurring broad-based neighborhood change where it would not happen otherwise.

Thursday 12 March
Chris Severen (Philadelphia Federal Reserve Bank)
'Scale Effects of Rapid Transit and Automobile Adoption'

Abstract: We show that scale effects of rapid transit---access to multiple transit lines---is a key determinant of the effect of transit on travel behavior. Households near two or more lines are much less likely to adopt a vehicle than households near only a single line. We study travel behavior in Mexico City, which greatly expanded its transit system during our study window (1994--2017). We build a partial-equilibrium quantitative spatial model to measure household valuations of access and understand the determinants of vehicle adoption. Notably, the model accommodates continuously heterogeneous preferences while retaining attractive aggregation properties. Model results indicate the consumption market access overwhelmingly determines the scale effects of transit. Moreover, because even the highest-income households value improvements of transit relative to automobile market access, they adjust automobile adoption in response to large transit expansions

Thursday 19 March
Elena Gentili (Bank of Italy)
'How to Rapidly Assess the Economic Consequences of Floods Using Public Data Sources? Evidence from Northern Italy'

Abstract: This paper uses high-frequency public data to provide an ex-post evaluation of two floods that hit the Italian region of Emilia-Romagna in May 2023, just a few weeks after they occurred. Using nightlight data to measure economic activity and considering a triple difference-in-differences empirical framework, we find a decline in nightlight activity in flooded municipalities in the three weeks surrounding the two floods, a rebound effect in the following three weeks, but no effect thereafter. In the most pessimistic scenario, the reduction in GDP growth in flooded municipalities in 2023 is between 0.3 and 0.8, excluding the agricultural sector. The duration of the impact of the floods is broadly confirmed by the other two proxies for economic activity available at the daily frequence and municipal level, i.e. hiring and road traffic data. We also find temporary effects on the housing market demand, but no effects on the house prices asked by the sellers and the number of posted advertisements for house sales, suggesting that the housing market in flooded municipalities already discounts the risk of such natural events.

Thursday 26 March
Daniel Favre, Matteo Gamalerio & Albert Solé-Ollé (U. de Barcelona & IEB)
'Political Backlash Against Climate Policy:The Electoral Costs of Renewable Energy in a Multilayer Government'

Abstract: Local opposition to wind farms raises concerns that the clean-energy transition may generate electoral backlash. This paper studies how such a backlash is shaped by multilevel governance when siting decisions involve both regional and municipal authorities. We assemble a new dataset of wind-farm authorizations in Spain (1991–2019) by coding thousands of administrative decisions published in regional gazettes using large language models, allowing us to track project timing and location nationwide.

Focusing on municipal elections, we estimate staggered treatment effects using a Local Projections difference-in-differences design. Wind-farm authorizations reduce the municipal vote share of the regional incumbent party by about 1.7 percentage points, with similar effects on whether regional and local governments are aligned or not. In contrast, the mayor’s party shows no average effect, though estimates suggest negative effects when aligned and positive effects when unaligned. Interpreted through a multilevel accountability framework, these patterns imply that voters primarily attribute responsibility for wind-farm siting to regional governments.

We explore institutional explanations for this attribution by examining whether electoral responses vary with proxies for municipal veto power, including regional permitting laws and the existence of binding local land-use plans. The results shed light on how the allocation of authority across tiers of government shapes political support for the energy transition.

Spring Term 2026

Friday 17 April
Prof Alexander Whalley (University of Calgary)
'Researchers, Ideas and Growth: Evidence from Vietnam Draft Avoidance'

Abstract: Researchers’ ideas are central to economic growth yet returns to their labor remains unclear. We exploit a unique historical setting to study the effects of researchers’ labor effort on knowledge production and economic growth. During the Vietnam War, draft deferment for graduate education ended in 1967 causing thousands of STEM-trained scientists facing draft risk to join the research workforce. Using novel data on researcher effort during the 1960s in the US, we show that publication output responded strongly to this increased effort of researchers, while patents did not. Firms more exposed to the increase in US-born researcher effort became more productive. Our estimates imply that even in an environment where new ideas are getting harder to find, the social rate of return to research effort is over 60%.

Thursday 14 May
Dr Kerstin Schaefer (Utrecht University)
'Chinese Firms bridging the Standardization Gap in 3GPP: Liabilities of Outsidership and the Role of Technological Shifts'

Abstract: Chinese firms often face liabilities of outsidership, struggling to access established global technology 4 development networks. Focusing on technical standardization, we analyze how generational technology 5 shifts affect collaboration in 3GPP, the body developing global telecommunication standards. 6 Employing fractional logit regressions on a standards contribution panel dataset, we observe that 7 Chinese firms strengthened their collaboration in standardization networks following the shift from 3G 8 to 4G, particularly with geographically and institutionally proximate partners in the Asia-Pacific. This 9 narrowed the standardization gap, leading us to conclude that technological shifts within collaborative 10 networks might offer opportunities for late entrants to become standard setters.