Neave O'Clery (University College London - CASA): Do higher order connections matter? Measuring urban and regional industry agglomeration patterns

Abstract | This talk will discuss a number of recent papers on the theme of measuring urban and regional industry agglomeration patterns. In particular, we will focus on the role of high order inter-industry connections, as encoded in the topology of industry networks or ’spaces', typically ignored in most common measures of industry agglomeration. Using data for the US, Ireland, Colombia and the UK, we show that these connections can play a key role in predicting a range of quantities such as local industry entry and employment growth.

Bio | Neave O'Clery is currently Associate Professor in Applied Urban Science at UCL. She was previously a Senior Research Fellow at the Mathematical Institute at the University of Oxford, and prior that a Fulbright Scholar and Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Center for International Development at the Harvard Kennedy School following her PhD (mathematics) at Imperial College. Neave is also founder and Editor in Chief of Angle, an online journal focusing on the intersection of policy, politics and science since 2009. Her current research focuses on data and network modelling of economic development and urban systems.