Podcast: migration, cities, Brexit

I did a Centre for Cities podcast on migration, urban economies and Brexit a few weeks back, with Andrew Carter (CFC) and Nicola Headlam (Oxford Uni).

Here’s the blurb:

From the benefits of cognitive diversity in the workforce to the success of the entrepreneur program, our guests offer insights from their own research on the less publicised impacts migrants have on the economy. They go on to discuss the big question; does net migration have an overall positive or negative effect on the UK economy? Finally they consider how Brexit might affect migration patterns and examine what benefits diasporic communities can have on facilitating trade links with new markets.

You can listen here – it’s about an hour in total.

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‘After Florida’ wins a prize

I’m delighted (and honestly, surprised) to have won the 2016 Jim Lewis Prize for my paper on the economics of diversity – After Florida – which is out in European Urban and Regional Studies. The prize is awarded for the most innovative paper published in EURS the previous year.

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You can read the whole paper here. To give you a flavour, the abstract is below.

In recent years, most European countries have experienced substantial demographic changes and rising cultural diversity. Understanding the social and economic impacts of these shifts is a major challenge for policymakers. Richard Florida’s ideas have provided a popular – and pervasive – framework for doing so. This paper assesses Florida’s legacy and sets out a ‘post-Florida’ framework for ‘technology, talent and tolerance’ research. The paper first traces the development of Florida’s ideas. ‘Florida 1.0’, encapsulated by the Three Ts framework, has performed badly in practice. There are problems in bringing causality to the fundamental relationships, and in consistently replicating the results in other countries. ‘Florida 2.0’, though suggests that Creative Class metrics have value as alternative measures of human capital. This creates space for a post-Florida agenda based on economic microfoundations.

I argue that the growing body of ‘economics of diversity’ research meets these conditions, and review theory and empirics. Urban ‘diversity shocks’ shift the size and composition of populations and workforces, with impacts operating via labour markets, and through wider production and consumption networks. While short-term labour market effects are small, over time low-value industrial sectors may become migrant-dependent. Diversity may help raise productivity and wages through innovation, entrepreneurship, market access and trade channels. Bigger, more diverse cities help generate hybridised goods and services, but may also raise local costs through crowding. All of this presents new challenges for policymakers, who need to manage diversity’s net effects, and address both economic costs and benefits.

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The paper has its origins in the intro chapter to my PHD thesis. If you fancy wading deeper in, that’s here.

RGS talk on migration

A late plug for this. I did a panel event on ‘Europe’s Migration Crisis’ with the Royal Geographical Society a few weeks back, alongside Heaven Crawley, Madeleine Sumption and Christina Boswell. The Guardian’s estimable David Walker chaired it.

I gave an overview of the local economics of migration, focusing on the recent UK experience, and drawing on some of my work – as well as borrowing a couple of nice maps from the Migration Observatory.

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Here’s the summary I sent the organisers:

My talk will look at migration impacts at the local level, especially in cities. I’ll argue that we should look both at people flows, but also at the diversity that migration brings. Today’s public conversation about migration is focused on jobs, housing and public services. That’s understandable, and there are some real concerns here.

I also want to shift the conversation to cover migration as an influence on long term economic growth, with impacts on productivity, innovation, entrepreneurship and trade. Skilled migrants (from inside and outside the EU) are central to this, and the evidence we have suggests that there are positive effects of these groups on economic outcomes policymakers should care about. We need to know much more about how these channels work, of course. But national government and cities can start – now – to adjust policy to make more of these opportunities. 

There’s a nice write-up of the event on the RGS blog. If you want more detail, my slides are here.

New essay on London’s digital industries

I’ve written a piece for the new issue of London Essays, the beautifully-designed journal published by Centre for London.

Having covered soft power, the latest issue looks at technology. It launches on 1 July, but you can read my article early here: I take a look at London’s digital industries and their contribution to the city’s economic future, crunch some new numbers and try not to make too many jokes about artisanal products.

Hope you enjoy reading it!

Writing it has been good preparation for the LSE lecture I’m chairing on 7 July, where Gerard Grech, CEO of Tech City UK will be setting out his thoughts on London’s digital future, and the prospects for the tech sector across the country. If you can make it, please come say hello.

 

 

What have high-skilled migrants ever done for us?

I’ve got a new paper out in the IZA Journal of Migration.

It’s about high skilled migrants – by which I mean people with a degree, with specialist skills (e.g. scientists) or with rich experience in (say) entrepreneurship. It’s based on some recent work for the UK Government’s Migration Advisory Committee.

In the UK, immigration is once again a top 3 issue for public opinion, it’s pretty important to gather what evidence we have.

Here’s the abstract:

In recent years, the economics of migration literature has shown a substantial growth in papers exploring host country impacts beyond the labour market. Specifically, researchers have begun to shift their attention from labour market and fiscal changes, towards exploring what we might call ‘the wider effects of migration’ on the production and consumption sides of the economy – and the role of high-skilled migrants in these processes. This paper surveys the emerging ‘wider impacts’ literature, including studies from the US, European and other countries. It sets out some simple, non-technical frameworks, discusses the empirical findings and identifies avenues for future research.

Thanks to the joys of Open Access, you can read the whole thing here. In case you don’t have time, here are some of the main points:

1/ Skilled migrants now comprise around 30% of OECD migrants – that’s 25% more than in 2000/1. And the future trend is upward.

2/ We know quite a lot about immigration’s impact on wages and jobs (positive on the average, but more serious for some low skilled workers). However, we know almost nothing about the wider impacts of immigration – on productivity and its drivers, and on housing or public services – where high-skilled migrants are going to be central.

3/ To get a sense of these impacts, we need to think about immigration in terms of economic growth – that is, as a factor in production and something that shifts the size and composition of local populations.

4/ In theory, these wider impacts are ambiguous. For example, more diverse workforces could generate more new ideas; but diverse teams could have communication problems or lower trust.

5/ In practice, the international evidence suggests that aggregate wider impacts are positive (gains outweigh losses). In places like Silicon Valley, high skill migrants are a driving force in the local economy.

6/ That’s encouraging for pro-migration voices in the UK and elsewhere, but we still need much more evidence. In particular, we need to know more about the winners and losers in these aggregate outcomes.

7/ Ideally, the UK and other countries would develop experimental policies for high-skilled migrants, enableing us to cleanly identify these effects. Turning the Tier 1 entrepreneur route into a proper Startup Visa is one obvious option. Creating a market for wealthy investors via visa auctions is another. Both could allow for evaluation through randomised trials or quasi-experimental approaches. But the current politics of immigration are making this kind of thing increasingly difficult to do.

Do inventors talk to strangers?

I’ve a new working paper out, written with my LSE colleagues Riccardo Crescenzi and Andrés Rodríguez-Pose. It’s available in three flavours, CEPR [£], IZA and SERC.

Here’s the abstract:

This paper investigates how physical, organisational, institutional, cognitive, social, and ethnic proximities between inventors shape their collaboration decisions. Using a new panel of UK inventors and a novel identification strategy, this paper systematically explores the net effects of all these ‘proximities’ on co-patenting. The regression analysis allows us to identify the full effects of each proximity, both on choice of collaborator and on the underlying decision to collaborate. The results show that physical proximity is an important influence on collaboration, but is mediated by organisational and ethnic factors. Over time, physical proximity increases in salience. For multiple inventors, geographic proximity is, however, much less important than organisational, social, and ethnic links. For inventors as a whole, proximities are fundamentally complementary, while for multiple inventors they are substitutes.

In other words, we find that physical proximity is critical to break the ice in a research collaboration; once the relationship has been established, however, other forms of proximity become more important. Crucially, for multiple inventors we find that co-location basically disappears as a driver of collaboration.

Obvious, you might think. But I’d argue that the multiple inventor group finding is pretty counter-intuitive. Our results also imply that the gains from incubators and research labs are strong for young researchers, but may fall off quite quickly. And our numbers chime with the ‘nursery cities’ hypothesis – basically, big cities are better for small young firms than older, larger ones.

UPDATE: an improved version of the paper is forthcoming in Research Policy. Read it here.

Bigger, more urban, more diverse

The latest Census data confirms three things we already knew. First, Britain is becoming a bigger and more culturally diverse society. Second, net migration is one of the main drivers. Third, this diversity is largely urbanised – especially in London.

Beneath these headlines are many complications. Diversity is shifting across a number of dimensions at once – country of birth, ethnicity, religion and language. Official ethnic groupings are increasingly inadequate to capture what’s going on: see the huge growth in ‘other white’ and other ‘other’ categories.

Many of these trends will continue, with Leeds University researchers projecting a 20% minority ethnic population by 2051. But there is no obvious evidence that diversity is eroding national identity – 91% of residents identify with at least one UK national identity.

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These demographic changes are among the most profound of our lifetimes. So what are the economic and social impacts of these shifts?

My research is taking first steps towards answering the economic questions. European Urban and Regional Studies have just published this piece, which gives you a nice overview.

There is more detail in these working papers on the economics of super-diversity, the long term impacts of migration in cities, ethnic inventors, and diversity, entrepreneurship and innovation in London firms. This last piece, joint with Neil Lee, is coming out shortly in Economic Geography.

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We’re only beginning to understand some of these long term, dynamic channels. So it’s an exciting – and important – time to be working in the field.

Many of the key people will be in the UK in April for the 2013 NORFACE Conference. If you’re around, I’d encourage you to join us.

Is long term growth really ‘over’?

Robert Gordon’s new NBER paper, ‘Is US Economic Growth Over?’ has been making waves in the past few weeks. Here are a few thoughts on it.

A short version of Gordon’s argument is here. His provocative topline is:

The paper … suggests not just that economic growth was a one-time thing centred on 1750-2050, but also that because there was no growth before 1750, there might conceivably be no growth after 2050 or 2100. The process of innovation may be battering its head against the wall of diminishing returns. Indeed, this is already evident in much of the innovation sector …

Much of this is familiar from Tyler Cowen’s book ‘The Great Stagnation’, which kicked up a similar dustcloud in 2011. Gordon goes on to identify six ‘headwinds’ that may push back innovation in the States. These are: an ageing population, low skills and poor state education systems, inequality, globalisation and outsourcing, environmental constraints and government/consumer debt overhangs.

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Gordon is very clear that the analysis applies only to the US, but is also keen for researchers in other countries to pitch in. So, in no particular order:

1/ Many of the six ‘headwinds’ are much stronger in the US than elsewhere (a weak public education system in particular). As Gordon says, ‘my guess is that a Canadian or Swedish economist looking at the past and future of his or her country would not be nearly so alarmed’. (p23)

2/ Equally, some of these headwinds might reverse direction. For example, climate change may create new economic opportunities, not just constraints.

3/ This is very long wave analysis, and frankly it’s too early to tell if Internet-based innovation – Gordon’s ‘third industrial revolution’ – has really come to an end. That data only runs from 1960-2007; but previous revolutions took at least 100 years to fully diffuse. It feels premature to say that ‘the productivity impact of IR3 evaporated after only 8 years.’ (p13)

4/ There’s also something slightly odd about the historical treatment – which is done in terms of the country at the technology frontier. Gordon looks at the UK from 1300-1906, then the US til the present day. But it’s not obvious the underlying country drivers of growth are the same. And as Gordon acknowledges (p6), the future frontier country might not be the US.

5/ The analysis overlooks the dynamic nature of some innovations. Gordon suggests that urbanisation ‘only happens once’ – true, but its effects are persistent. Agglomeration economies can trigger virtuous cycles of urban development, raising growth over very long periods.

6/ Similarly, innovations like ‘travel speed’ haven’t changed much (p2) but their diffusion has been massive – e.g. far more people have access to plane travel than in 1958. This must have some impact on economic welfare through market size, if not on productivity.

7/ Gordon is perhaps a bit unfair on internet innovations. As he rightly points out, for most people running water and central heating are more ‘important’ than broadband. But he doesn’t really consider the internet as a general purpose technology with multiple affordances – many of which we’ve only just started to grasp. Equally, he doesn’t really consider big data, mobile, cloud or social technologies.

8/ The paper doesn’t really explore reasons why ‘IR3’ technologies haven’t fed through into labour productivity stats. There’s now a massive organisational literature which provides some answers. Work by Erik Brynjolfsson tells us that to make the most of ICTs, firms need to do substantial complementary investment in management and organisational structures. Research by John Van Reenen, Nick Bloom and others also highlights the importance of good management in triggering productivity gains for firms.

Some sectors have understood this better than others – such as ICT, retail and financial services, which have seen substantial technology-related productivity jumps.

In other words, just ‘putting a computer on the desk’ isn’t going to have much effect. And looking at average productivity changes hides some big sectoral differences. But this is how Gordon’s paper is thinking about it. A closer, finer-grained analysis might turn up some different answers.

A Tale of Tech City

We launched A Tale of Tech City yesterday at Google Campus. It went very well – lots of robust discussion, and happily, general acclaim for the report.

The Centre for London project is joint work with Emma Vandore and Rob Whitehead, and takes an unvarnished look at the East London digital ecosystem.

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We ran a lot of numbers. By crunching the BSD, the best data there is, we find the East London scene is a lot bigger than anyone thought – at least 1500 firms (a conservative estimate), probably more like 3300 (drawing a wider line).

We also did seven international case studies to see how London stacks up in global terms. (Hint: Silicon Alley, not Silicon Valley.)

We then went out and did in-depth interviews with a lot of local firms, plus others working in finance, workspace and policy.

We identify six challenges for East London businesses, and make suggestions for tweaking the strategy and policy mix. In particular, we argue for a stronger focus on business development, helping young London firms become global players – and for Government to temper expectations for a new cluster in the Olympic Park. These things can’t be masterplanned.

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Those messages got the thumbs up from GLA Deputy Mayor Kit Malthouse, Hackney’s Guy Nicholson, Unruly’s Sarah Wood and from Matt Biddulph, who all joined me on the platform. The Tech City Investment Organisation is now running with some of our ideas – see here – and there are signs of an Olympics Media Centre rethink too.

You can download the whole thing here.

We’ve had pretty good press so far, with coverage on the BBC (here and here), Financial Times, Wall St Journal, Guardian and the Independent … plus a nice write-up by Richard Florida in The Atlantic.

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I’m now starting to think about further work. Two promising avenues are looking across the digital economy in the rest of London, and exploring NY-LON in depth – there are some striking parallels between the London and New York scenes. Get in touch if you’d like to talk about either of these.

Manufacturing hipsters

I’ve just finished Enrico Moretti’s terrific new book, The New Geography of Jobs. Moretti is an annoyingly young and brilliant economist at UC Berkeley who made his name with seminal papers on agglomeration, knowledge spillovers and multiplier effects. He’s now following Ed Glaeser and Paul Krugman out of the seminar room into the mainstream.

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Moretti’s argument is in three parts. First, globalisation has made the knowledge economy increasingly important as a source of productivity and wealth in countries like the US (and the UK). Each ‘innovation economy’ job supports five others, two in other professions and three in local services.

Second, these big shifts have very uneven impacts. Cities concentrate economic activity. Places’ initial advantages matter. People’s ability and willingness to move is limited. So social and spatial disparities tend to grow – even though higher living costs in richer cities partly cancel out higher wages.

Third, our policy responses need to change. Unlike Glaeser, Moretti likes some area-based initiatives. But he also pushes strongly for public science, better public education and raising high-skill immigration.

So far, so familiar – see Glaeser’s The Triumph of the City, or Richard Florida’s The Great Reset. But Moretti arguing that it’s precisely these long term trends and their implications that need to be deeply understood. (Meanwhile, Glaeser gets one mention in the index – the same as Marlene Dietrich – and Florida gets a discreet knife in the ribs in Chapter 5.)

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The book also has great range. Moretti combines serious urban economics and economic geography with a number of excursions – on the historical origins of Hollywood, Berlin and culture-led regeneration, the dynamics of shared workspaces, cleantech investment, gentrification and ethnic inventors.  In many pop academic books these passages feel bolted on – a break from the high-level narrative. In this case they’re actually doing some intellectual work.

One of the richest passages comes early on. In the most successful cities, Moretti suggests, the innovation economy is supporting the return of urban manufacturing. He visits the site of the old Levi’s factory in San Francisco to find ‘dozens of workshops offering hand-crafted products’ – such as bespoke clothing line Cut Loose and the DODOCase iPad case factory.

Across town on Pier 17, Tcho has taken over an old warehouse and converted it into a craft chocolate factory, importing vintage German machinery and high-tech computerised gear. (The chocolate is absolutely amazing.) In London, S.E.H. Kelly (limited-run menswear), The Kernel (craft beer) and Berg’s Little Printer are riding the same wave.

The growth of high-end manufacturing in cities seems rich with possibilities. But Moretti convincingly shows that it’s fundamentally a niche phenomenon. First, this kind of manufacturing is essentially the result of wealth created elsewhere in the city. Although these firms can trade globally, their key market remains local – in that sense, they’re a form of high-end local service.

Second, an important part of these products’ appeal is that they’re unusual, or unique. Both the thing – and the experience of buying it – are positional goods. That business model then allows firms to cover high manufacturing costs. Scaling up would involve either jacking up prices even higher, or moving production to lower-cost locations – precisely what such firms are reacting against.

The most extreme example of this is also the best known. American Apparel gear sells precisely because it’s made in LA (and because of its softcore ads, of course). If Moretti is right, it literally couldn’t be made anywhere else.

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A more profound transformation, which the book doesn’t touch on, is the emergence of small-scale digital manufacturing. With 3D printers，economies of scale matter much less: there’s no need to retool a production line, and almost infinite customisation should be possible. The technology is already good enough to make specialised car parts, and some nice art objects.

Micro-manufacturing is deeply disruptive – especially when combined with zero-cost marketing and sales online.  Craft manufacturers will adopt it. But it’ll be the technology, as much as the brand positioning, that’s doing the hard work.