ALBERTO
DIAZ DAPENA

Alberto Díaz Dapena is PhD in Economics by the University of Oviedo (2017). The thesis (funded by the Ministry of Science and Innovation) was titled ‘The spatial scale and the empirics of regional economics: growth, convergence and agglomerations’, and granted with ‘Cum Laude’, ‘International mention’ and the doctorate award. After the PhD, he was hired as a Postdoc researcher in the European project ‘Integrative mechanisms for addressing spatial justice and territorial inequalities in Europe – IMAJINE’ between 2017 and 2018. Then, he became an Assistant Professor at the University of León (2018), where he also was the Secretary for Academic Affairs. Finally, he moved to the University of Oviedo (2020). He has passed the evaluation for the position of non-civil servant associate professor. During his research career, he has studied the importance of spatial scale and its effects on empirical analyzes as a fundamental value in the field of regional economy. This consistency has been maintained during the post-doc period, developing research tasks within the framework of the European project IMAJINE, which seeks to obtain economic and social conclusions on a scale. His research is mainly focused on studying the differences between rural and urban territories. These differences are explained in a context where macroeconomic models at a national level are not always suitable to explain core-periphery relationships between these places. In this theoretical framework, cities are a key component to understand the behavior of the economy. This line of research has led to measures of the aggregation effect on the results through Montecarlo simulations, new methodologies to explicitly introduce the hierarchy in spatial models, as well as proposals of methodologies to obtain new indicators at disaggregated levels for research. The application of these models has allowed to study different hypothesis. For example, the link between the evolution of the main cities in a country and the national growth, or the emerge of new challenges created by an asymmetric distribution of the activity. The appearance of places left out of the international integration of country or the limited convergence between local territories are some consequences of this asymmetric distribution. The results of this research have been published in well-known international journals of the regional science field, like International Regional Science Review, Social Indicators Research or Annals of Regional Science (with a value of 3 in the h-index). He also has presented them in international congresses of regional science (ERSA, RSAI and NARSC), as well as national ones (AECR), obtaining the Young Researcher award in 2012. To perform his research, he has done different stays abroad as a visiting scholar (funded by the Ministry of Science and Innovation), in universities like the University of Illinois (working with the regional research group REAL), the Michigan State University (working with the rural development group NCRCRD), or the University of Aberystwyth.