Hi everyone! I’m happy to announce that last month I graduated with an MSc in Local Economic Development from the London School of Economics, with Distinction. I also received the prize for best dissertation, and I tied for top marks receiving the joint prize for best overall performance!

I didn’t know I won those until they handed me my placard at the ceremony, so it was a real shock. It turns out it was on my final transcript beforehand, but since I knew my grades I didn’t look at it in advance. It’s fun to know that even at the LSE I’m at the top of my game 🙂

I could not have done this without all the people who supported me. I’d like to thank my professors, whose lectures I looked forwards to every day. Thank you to all my friends, especially those who studied with me, pleasantly distracted me from my studies, or phoned from home to help ease the homesickness. Finally, I’d especially like to thank my parents. Without their support I would not have been able to voyage this far from home. 

I’ve fielded many questions from friends and family about this degree, and the first question I always get is “local to where?” so I figure I’ll start here.

Local economic development, as a discipline, focuses on the scale of the development: place-based policy focused on the local region. This region is typically a city or province, separate from macroeconomics where you’d focus on a country as a whole.

Trade is the lifeblood of cities, so that’s where one of the courses started. Cities can only grow beyond their immediate farming hinterlands through trade, and the economy of a city is based on its export industry. In a globalized world the reach of a given city expands, allowing further specialization and cities that reach well beyond the nation they find themselves in. So LED starts in broad strokes, with discussions of trade and globalization, flows of goods and knowledge, how growth occurs, and systems of cities on the world stage.

From there, LED zooms all the way in to questions of how the internal structure of cities is organized. If you are trying to improve a city, it’s important to also understand this smaller scale that’s easier to change. From transportation infrastructure to spatial mismatches between where people live and where the jobs are located, to the economics of slums, to how a cities rental price changes with distance from its central business district, my LED courses covered it all. 

As many of you know, I love a) trains, and b) housing and housing policy. There’s a lot of big questions LED can help answer, and how to reduce the extreme commute times and extreme cost of living crisis facing many cities are two of the ones I aim to tackle. I’ve been unbelievably lucky in that my first project at work has me combining both of these, looking at what happens to local economies when train stations are built or redeveloped. This project is for a branch of a nation’s government too, so it’s likely my work will directly inform policy. Once it’s published I’ll drop a link here.

I took some time thinking about what to write here, hence this post coming out a month since my graduation. I have a graveyard of half-finished blog posts I was writing as a study tool, and I started to try to clean them up to post here before realizing I was effectively trying to write an entire textbook.  Given I have a full time job, that one probably won’t happen. If you want something that covers a lot of what I learned (albeit for a general audience and with no equations to read through), I strongly recommend The New Geography of Jobs by Enrico Moretti. It’s a light read, and a good intro to the findings of the field for non-economists.