Kristinn was presented with the award at the final conference dinner in the Wales Millennium Centre at Cardiff Bay. From left to right: Professor Kim Swales, Director of the Fraser of Allander Institute, Dr Alessandra Faggian treasurer of the RSAIBIS, Kristinn Hermannsson, Professor Phil McCann special advisor on regional policy to the European Commission and chairman of the RSAIBIS, Dr Declan Jordan secretary of the RSAIBIS.
Mr Kristinn Hermannsson, a PhD student at the Fraser of Allander Institute in the Department of Economics, was awarded the prize of best paper of an early career researcher at the 40th annual conference of the Regional Science Association International British and Irish Section (RSAIBIS), which was held in Cardiff, Wales, on September 6-8. The paper is based on his dissertation on the overall economic impact of higher education institutions, which is supervised by professors Kim Swales and Peter McGregor.
This is the second year in a row this award is granted to a Strathclyder. At last year's conference Mr Stuart McIntyre, a PhD student of Professor Kim Swales and Dr Karen Turner, received the award for his paper on regional voting behaviour in the UK, co-authored with Christa Jensen and Donald Lacombe of the University of West Virginia.
Kristinn's paper, titled "Interregional Expenditure and Displacement Impacts of Student Consumption in Scotland," identifies how mobile students both bring expenditures to Scotland, and also transfer expenditures within the country. A significant original contribution of the paper is to formally identify that this story is not only a positive one, since as well as bringing consumption expenditure to the local area where they study students can also displace expenditures in their region of origin. This study applies a novel 3-region Input-Input Output table, which uses commuting and household accounts data to identify wage and consumption flows between Glasgow City, the wider Strathclyde metropolitan area and the rest of Scotland. This is combined with data on the study area and origin on HE students in Scotland and results from a recent student income and expenditure survey to derive interregional expenditure and displacement patterns of HE students within Scotland.
The paper builds on an extensive legacy of previous work carried out in Scotland and at the University of Strathclyde. Studying the expenditure impacts of Higher Education Institutions and their students stretches back over 40 years in Scotland. What is probably the earliest source, published in a peer reviewed journal, is the work of Christopher Blake & Stuart McDowall on the local expenditure impacts of the University of St Andrews released in the Scottish Journal of Political Economy in 1967. Significant contributions to the subsequent literature have been made at Strathclyde, for example the work of Professors Iain McNicoll and Jim Love in the 1980s on the impact of students' consumption expenditures, as well as work carried out in the 90s and 00s by Ursula Kelly and Iain McNicoll on various aspects of HEIs expenditure impacts.
The latest wave of higher education-related research at Strathclyde is the Overall Impacts of Higher Education Institutions on Regional Economies Initiative, which sought to build on and extend previous work, in particular by quantifying the impact of non-expenditure effects, such as through skills and knowledge. It should be noted that one of the key sources of evidence drawn on in the paper is the student income and expenditure survey conducted, amongst others, by colleagues in the Scottish Centre for Employment Research (SCER) and released by the Scottish Government.