Prof Juan Roses Vendoiro

This course is available on the MSc in Economic History, MSc in Economic History (Research), MSc in Financial History, MSc in Global Economic History and MSc in Political Economy of Late Development. This course is available with permission as an outside option to students on other programmes where regulations permit. This course uses controlled access as part of the course selection process. For information on controlled access courses, including eligibility, application processes, deadlines, and departmental contact details, please refer to the Controlled Access Courses webpage.

How to apply: All Economic History courses are controlled access and capped. Priority will be given to students for whom the course is within their programme regulations.

All course choices submitted before the deadline will be considered. It is advisable that students submit a statement in support of their course choices as these will be used to allocate places where a course is oversubscribed.

Deadline for application: First round offers will be sent on Monday 28 September 2026. Students who submit their course choices after the deadline and students wishing to take an Economic History course as an outside option will be waitlisted initially and informed by Wednesday 30 September 2026 whether they have been successful.

Once an offer has been sent, you have 48 hours to accept it before it times out. Once an offer has timed out, it will be re-allocated to someone on the waitlist. In all cases, it is strongly advised that you have an alternative course choice as a back-up in case you are unable to secure your first choice.

For queries contact: If you have any questions, please contact the MSc Programmes Officer (o.harrison1@lse.ac.uk). A list of all taught master’s courses in this Department are listed on LSE’s course guide webpages. Guidance on how to apply to individual controlled access courses can also be found on LSE for You.

Students should have completed courses in intermediate level econometrics.

Knowledge of spatial econometric packages like GIS is not necessary. The course will not provide a comprehensive training in econometric methods or computer applications. Stata experience is an advantage.

The course is designed to introduce students to cutting-edge topics in Historical Economic Geography that are both theoretically and empirically important. Historical Economic Geography examines how and why the location of economic activities changes over time and across different regions. It draws on methodologies from various social sciences, including Economic History, Economic Geography, Human Geography, Economics, and Econometrics.

The main objective of the course is to equip students with the skills necessary for advanced analysis of historical economic geography evidence and to understand how historical and geographical factors influence economic development. The course comprises nine three-hour seminars focused on specialised topics in historical economic geography, along with one preparatory research workshop. Each seminar is structured in the Harvard case style: the first part involves a Socratic discussion of assigned papers, concentrating on the economic question, the identification strategy, and the paper’s contribution to the field; the second part is a hands-on replication workshop where students reproduce key results using Stata, allowing them to build an intuitive understanding of the methods. The course content is updated annually to reflect recent developments in the discipline.

The topics considered in this edition of the course are the following. 1) General problems of research with historical and spatial data; 2) the construction of historical-spatial data; 3) historical analysis of market integration: time-series and dynamic panels; 4) historical analysis of the spatial concentration of economic activities: measurement and determinants; 5) historical and spatial analysis of factor markets; 6) historical analysis of local labour markets; 7) natural experiments in Historical Economic Geography: policies and shocks; 8) the evolution and measurement of regional inequality; 9) historical analysis of the urban space.

30 hours of computer workshop in the Winter Term.

Students will produce several short reviews of research papers and participate in the research workshop with an original project. The reviews' objective is to familiarize the students with the different methodologies and prepare them for their research projects. The research workshop will help them design the project and discuss its methodology. All formative coursework will receive written or oral feedback.

• Gibbons, S., & Overman, H. G. (2012). “Mostly pointless spatial econometrics?” Journal of Regional Science, 52(2), 172–191.
• Gibbons, S., Heblich, S., & Pinchbeck, E. W. (2024). “The spatial impacts of a massive rail disinvestment program: The Beeching Axe.” Journal of Urban Economics, 143, 103691.
• Steinwender, C. (2018). “Real effects of information frictions: When the states and the kingdom became united.” American Economic Review, 108(3), 657–696.
• Ahlfeldt, G. M., Redding, S. J., Sturm, D. M., & Wolf, N. (2015). “The economics of density: Evidence from the Berlin Wall.” Econometrica, 83(6), 2127–2189.
• Hornbeck, R., & Naidu, S. (2014). “When the levee breaks: Black migration and economic development in the American South.” American Economic Review, 104(3), 963–990.
• Kline, P., & Moretti, E. (2014). “Local economic development, agglomeration economies, and the big push: 100 years of evidence from the Tennessee Valley Authority.” The Quarterly Journal of Economics, 129(1), 275–331.
• Ambrus, A., Field, E., & Gonzalez, R. (2020). “Loss in the time of cholera: Long-run impact of a disease epidemic on the urban landscape.” American Economic Review, 110(2), 475–525.
• Gonzalez-Navarro, M., & Turner, M. A. (2018). “Subways and urban growth: Evidence from earth.” Journal of Urban Economics, 108, 85–106.

Project (100%, 5000 words).

The research project is the sole summative assessment. Students design and execute an original piece of empirical research in historical economic geography, applying the methods and ideas discussed in the course to a question of their choosing. Assessment is based on five criteria: research question and motivation (10%), data construction and description (20%), identification strategy (30%), results and robustness (25%), and discussion and limitations (15%). An oral defence of 15 minutes is held within two weeks of submission.

A mandatory AI Audit appendix (300–500 words, ungraded but compulsory) must be included with every project submission, documenting which AI tools were used, at which stages, and including at least one example of AI output that was wrong or misleading and how the student identified and corrected it.