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…

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 Ozgen (Birmingham), Tom Kemeny (Toronto) and Anna Rosso (Insubria). These are both full-time post-doc positions, funded til July 2025 in the first instance.

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…

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…

The City and the Virus, redux 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…

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

The lovely people at KooZA/rch have done an interview with me: on how COVID-19 has altered urbanity, and how far these changes might stick around. There’s also some superb photography by Ashley Gilberston. Below is an excerpt: you can read the whole thing here. What does a deactivated city mean…

I’ve got a new paper on incubators, accelerators and cities out in Urban Studies. It’s written with Margarida Madaleno, Henry Overman and Sevrin Waights. Why should you read it? I think there’s four reasons to care about this stuff: First, we know that physical co-location has a range of economic…