Economic Geography

Pierre-Alexandre Ballard is making available EconGeo, a new software (in R) to easily compute a series of indices commonly used in the fields of economic geography, economic complexity, and evolutionary economics to describe the location, distribution, spatial organization, structure, and complexity of economic activities. A short introduction to this R package is available here: http://econ.geo.uu.nl/peeg/peeg1709.pdf.

Abstract: The R statistical software is increasingly used to perform analysis on the spatial distribution of economic activities. It contains state-of-the-art statistical and graphical routines not yet available in other software such as SAS, Stata, or SPSS. R is also free and open-source. Many graduate students and researchers, however, find programming in R either too challenging or end up spending a lot of their precious time solving trivial programming tasks. This paper is a simple introduction on how to do economic geography in R using the EconGeo package (Balland, 2017). Users do not need extensive programming skills to use it. EconGeo allows to easily compute a series of indices commonly used in the fields of economic geography, economic complexity, and evolutionary economics to describe the location, distribution, spatial organization, structure, and complexity of economic activities. Functions include basic spatial indicators such as the location quotient, the Krugman specialization index, the Herfindahl or the Shannon entropy indices but also more advanced functions to compute different forms of normalized relatedness between economic activities or network-based measures of economic complexity. By opening and sharing the codes used to compute popular indicators of the spatial distribution of economic activities, one of the goals of this package is to make peer-reviewed empirical studies more reproducible by a large community of researchers.

Celebrating Susan Christopherson: A Panel Honoring her Life, Work, and Leadership in Economic Geography
(Sponsored by Economic Geography Specialty Group)

Friday, April 7, 1:20 p.m. - 3:00 p.m.
Room: Room 109, Hynes, Plaza Level (Panel Session)

Panelists:
Meric Gertler, President and Professor, University of Toronto
Amy Glasmeier, Professor, MIT
Shanti Gamper-Rabindran, Associate Professor, University of Pittsburgh
Jane Pollard, Professor, Newcastle University
Katharine Rankin, Professor, University of Toronto
Michael Storper, Professor, UCLA, LSE, Sciences Po

Contributions from the following as well as from the audience:
Gordon Clark, Professor, Oxford University
Rachel Weber, Professor, University of Illinois, Chicago
Jennifer Clark, Associate Professor, Georgia Institute of Technology — Event Chair

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This is a friendly reminder to please join us for a Women in Economic Geography Social Hour on Wednesday, April 5th at the AAG in Boston, MA. Our goal for this inaugural event is to gather in an informal opportunity to support and bring visibility to women's contributions to economic geography. Our hope is that women-identified economic geographers with diverse interests across the sub-discipline, and at all career stages, will attend.
 
This event will take place from 5:30-7:30pm at The Corner Tavern, a short walk from the Hynes Convention Center. Light refreshments will be provided. Drinks will be available for purchase. A flyer for the event can be found here: https://sites. google.com/site/ womenineconomicgeography/
 
Questions? Please submit them HERE.  
 
This event is being organized by Renee Tapp (Clark), Emily Rosenman (UBC), Jessa Loomis (Kentucky), and Kelly Kay (LSE/Berkeley).