New/old paper news: I’m very happy to have the lead article in this Urban Studies special issue on COVID-19 and cities. It’s open access! Many thanks to Scott Orford, Yingling Fan and Phil Hubbard for having me. This article is a time capsule. I first drafted these ideas, fast, as…

I have a new City Talks podcast with Eliza Easton (Deputy Director of the Creative PEC) and Centre for Cities CEO Andrew Carter. We talk about creative clusters, whether creative industries drive city growth, and what policymakers can do to help. The podcast is about an hour long. Happy listening! …

Job alert! I am recruiting an economist and a data scientist to join my new UKRI-funded project. We’re looking at the effects of diversities on productivity, innovation and entrepreneurship in UK firms and cities. The project is based at UCL, and is joint with Jon Reades, Anna Valero (LSE/CEP), Ceren…

Creative and cultural industries are very urbanised. What are the impacts of these creative clusters on their surrounding cities? In a new open access paper with Diana, Tasos and Massi, we test the causal effects of creative clusters on urban economies in the UK over 20 years. Overall, we have…

Heads up — I have a new clusters paper out, open access, written with Emmanouil Tranos and Christoph Stich. It’s largely technical — we develop a new set of tools for tracking cluster evolution using geolocated business website text and metadata, then test it out by tracking the growth of…

Some self-promotion — a team I’m leading has won one of seven new big ESRC grants for productivity research. Our new project will explore the economic effects of diverse teams and workplaces — and the wider role of urban diversity — on entrepreneurship, innovation and productivity in the UK. I’ll…

I haven’t read the Levelling Up White Paper yet but I’m going to talk about it anyway. I haven’t read it yet because it’s very long, I’m quite busy with other things right now — it’s a busy teaching term — and because many smart people have read and summarised…

I’ve got a new paper on COVID-19 and cities published in Urban Studies. You can read the whole thing here: it’s open access. I say new — it’s actually an extensive update and rebuild of this long blogpost I did in 2020. Not much of the original is left —…

Anna and I have a new paper out in Research Policy. Publishing this has been an epic experience: six years in the making.