NEWS
2023 Desmond Morton Research Excellence Lecture
Thursday, November 30, 2023, 1-3 pm (Lecture: 1-2 pm | Reception: 2-3 pm), Maanjiwe nendamowinan MN-3230, UTM
Register for the 2023 Desmond Morton Research Excellence Lecture! The Annual Desmond Morton Research Excellence Award recognizes outstanding achievement in research and scholarly activity by faculty members of the University of Toronto Mississauga. This year's recipient is Professor David Wolfe. A professor in the Department of Political Science at UTM and co-director of the Innovation Policy Lab at the Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy, Professor Wolfe is also the founder and inaugural Director of the Master of Urban Innovation Program in IMI. His research interests include the impact of digital technologies, innovation policy in Canada, and the role of governance institutions in local and regional economic development. This event will be held-in person and will include a lecture, Q&A period, and reception. All are welcome to attend in the Collaborative Digital Research Space for Professor Wolfe’s lecture, in which he’ll discuss the return of industrial policy, Canada’s failed innovation strategy and the role of governance relations in place-based development policy. Registration is now open
2023 Kauffman Best Paper Award winners:
A paper co-authored by IPL Affiliated faculty member Tara Vinodrai has been selected as the 2023 Kauffman Best Paper Award. The article 𝘔𝘢𝘬𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘴𝘱𝘢𝘤𝘦 𝘧𝘰𝘳 𝘮𝘢𝘬𝘪𝘯𝘨: 𝘌𝘷𝘪𝘥𝘦𝘯𝘤𝘦 𝘧𝘳𝘰𝘮 𝘊𝘢𝘯𝘢𝘥𝘪𝘢𝘯 𝘮𝘶𝘯𝘪𝘤𝘪𝘱𝘢𝘭𝘪𝘵𝘪𝘦𝘴 was co-authored by Brenton Nader, University of Waterloo and Patrick Casey, GSP Group. The purpose of this award program is to encourage innovative, insightful and timely research in city, community, urban or regional planning that is relevant to questions related to entrepreneurs and their firms as well as relevant to practitioners and policymakers who want to promote entrepreneurship.
IPL SPEAKER SERIES
Evolutionary Economic Geography – Realising Potential and Learning Opportunities in Regional Innovation Systems
November 16, 2023 | 4:00PM - 6:00PM Boardroom at the Observatory, Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy, 315 Bloor Street W., Toronto, ON
Dieter F. Kogler is an Associate Prof. in Economic Geography at University College Dublin. His research focus is on the geography of innovation and evolutionary economic geography, with particular emphasis on knowledge production and diffusion, and processes related to technological change, innovation, and economic growth. The Evolutionary Economic Geography (EEG) paradigm is quickly gaining momentum and recent contributions highlight several potential avenues for reimagining traditional approaches to regional innovation policymaking. Moving away from simple benchmarking exercises, which only continue to re-establishing already known static rankings with increasingly complex indicators, the aim of advanced EEG-based concepts and analysis should be to: a) establish development alternatives that rest on regional potential as indicated in the configuration of present capabilities, and b) to link those alternatives to forward-thinking strategies that consider regional innovation systems in the context of the global framework of knowledge production and diffusion. Here particular attention needs to be given to regional branching opportunities that derive from knowledge diversification processes driven by the collaboration patterns and location choices of individuals and firms.
The Silk Road of Science
November 30, 2023 | 4:30PM - 6:30PM, Boardroom at the Observatory, Munk School, 315 Bloor Street W. Toronto, ON
Christopher Esposito, Postdoctoral Fellow, Anderson School of Management, UCLA
Dr. Esposito develops a new framework to study the development and autonomy of national scientific enterprises. The method applies machine learning models to author information on 4.4 million scientific articles involving international collaboration to identify the project leaders (as opposed to the supporting actors) of each article. Aggregating leaders to their countries-of-residence allows the authors to determine the hierarchical position of power of each country in the global collaboration network. They use their framework to analyze recent changes in the hierarchical position of Chinese science. They conclude that the narrowing of the China-U.S. leadership gap and the strong leadership position China has established in much of Asia and Africa indicate that China’s scientific enterprise is sophisticated and territorially distributed. As a consequence, policymakers in the U.S. and other Western countries have less leverage in affecting China’s scientific development than is commonly believed.
RESEARCH
Who gets left behind by left behind places?
Dylan Connor, Aleksander Berg, Tom Kemeny, Peter J Kedron, Cambridge Journal of Regions, Economy and Society
This article documents that children growing up in places left behind by today’s economy experience lower levels of social mobility as adults. Using a longitudinal database that tracks over 20,000 places in the USA from 1980 to 2018, the authors identify two kinds of left behind places: the ‘long-term left behind’ that have struggled over long periods of history; and ‘recently left-behind’ places where conditions have deteriorated. Compared to children of similar baseline household income levels, the article finds that exposure to left behind places is associated with a 4-percentile reduction in adult income rank. Children fare considerably better when exposed to places where conditions are improving. These outcomes vary across prominent social and spatial categories and are compounded when nearby places are also experiencing hardship. Based on these findings, the authors argue that left behind places are having ‘scarring effects’ on children that could manifest long into the future, exacerbating the intergenerational challenges faced by low-income households and communities. Improvements in local economic conditions and outmigration to more prosperous places are, therefore, unlikely to be full remedies for the problems created by left behind places.
Does Subsidized Housing Facilitate More Sustainable Commute Patterns? Insights From Canadian Metropolitan Areas
Skye Collishaw, Markus Moos & Tara Vinodrai, Housing Policy Debate
Housing has become increasingly unaffordable, particularly in amenity-rich and transit-accessible areas. In this paper, the authors conduct an empirical analysis to investigate the relationship between living in subsidized housing and commuting patterns (mode and distance) in Toronto, Montreal, and Vancouver. The article finds that compared to otherwise similar individuals, those in subsidized dwellings have shorter and less auto-oriented commutes at statistically significant levels. The paper positions the discussion on subsidized housing in the broader context of the relationship between housing and sustainability, and within specific metropolitan geographies and histories of housing policies. In combination with prior research, the findings provide support for policies that promote investment in subsidized housing near transit as an affordability and sustainability strategy, particularly benefiting low-income renters.
