16th Geoffrey J. D. Hewings Regional Economics Workshop

The workshop will take place at WIFO Vienna from 24 to 26 September 2025. Participation in the workshop is free of charge. All papers presented may be published in the publication series of the WIFO Working Papers. Abstracts of papers and/or full papers intended for presentation have to be prepared in PDF-format and sent to regional@wifo.ac.at.

This year's workshop, which aims at bringing together researchers from various fields of regional economics to discuss ideas and exchange knowledge, will be jointly organized with the 20th workshop of the European Union - Regional Economics Applications Laboratory (EU-REAL), a research network in regional science formed by European scholars tied to the Regional Economics Applications Laboratory (REAL) at the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign, USA. We are proud to announce that two distinguished scholars accepted our invitation to give a keynote speech:

Gabriel M. Ahlfeldt, who holds the Chair of Econometrics at the Humboldt University School of Business and Economics. He is a quantitative spatial economist who joined Humboldt University in March 2024. Previously, he was Professor of Urban Economics and Land Development and the director of the MSc Real Estate Economics and Finance at the London School of Econom- ics. He is editor of Regional Science and Urban Economics, a visiting professor at the London School of Economics, affiliate of the CEPR and CESifo research networks, and a co-organizer of the Berlin School of Economics Quantitative Spatial Economics Research Seminar. At the
workshop Gabriel will talk about the “Geography of Life”.

Stefanie Peer, who is Associate Professor in the Department of Socioeconomics and Head of the Research Institute for Spatial and Real Estate Economics at WU Vienna. As a transport economist, she specializes in individuals' mobility behavior, transport policy evaluation, and the political economy of mobility.

You are invited to submit any theoretical or empirical contribution within the field of regional economics. The topics of interest include questions related to:
• regional specialization, structural change, and knowledge diffusion
• regional location analyses, spatial location choice, and location concepts
• geographical impact of economic policy measures
• regional labour markets
• regional tourism
• regional planning
or any other topic in regional economics.

The workshop is open for contributions characterized as "work in progress" and for contributions from young researchers. Submissions should include an extended abstract (minimum of 300 words) or a full paper.