David Grover

Research Fellow in Economic Geography and
Lincoln Institute of Land Policy Dissertation Fellow
Department of Geography and Environment
London School of Economics
Houghton Street
London  WC2A 2AE
UNITED KINGDOM

d.grover@lse.ac.uk
+44 (0) 20 7955 6152

 

Research interests

  • Technological change and environmental policy

  • Innovation, economic growth and development

  • Patents, R&D policy, intellectual property law

Thesis research

One way to think about the process of technological change is as a dynamic response to changing prices for the inputs we use to make things.  The environment is one of those inputs.  One of its most common use is as a pollution sink.  When the environment becomes scarce, we create institutions to manage it better.  This increases the price of using the environment.  Producers respond to these institutions by changing the way they make things, economising on the scarce input.  I am interested in these producers' response, which forms the backbone of the environment-saving technological change process.  I am interested in where the technical knowledge to actuate the response comes from, how it is exploited, who exploits it, and what conditions facilitate its creation, propagation and commercialisation.  

Academic publications

  • (2010) Grover, D. 'What makes an emission-saving invention valuable? US patent data and the global auto industry'  Working paper, LSE.
     

  • (2010) Grover, D. 'How technological is emission-saving technological change?  Compliance methods under US SO2 permit trading'  Working paper, LSE
     

  • (2010) Grover, D. 'Why the precipitous drop in pollution abatement R&D spending?  Econometric evidence from US industry, 1973 - 1998'  Working paper, LSE.
     

  • (2009) Grover, D.  ‘Revising the investment theory of Q to account for pollution abatement capital stock: a comment on Batabyal and Nijkamp’ (2008).  International Review of Regional Science (forthcoming).
     

  • (2006) Grover, D.  ‘Complementary currencies and local economic development’, Environment and Planning C: Government and Policy 24, 719-737.
     

  • (2005) Grover, D. (with Andrés Rodríguez-Pose) ‘Policy strategies to grow regional enterprises’ (Chapter 5) in Local and Regional Development by Pike, A., J. Tomany and A. Rodriguez-Pose. London: Routledge.
     

  • (2004) Book review of Growth fetish by Clive Hamilton.  Environment and Planning C: Government and Policy 22: 773-774.
     

  • (2004) Book review of Painting the White House Green by Lutter, R. and J. F. Shogren.  Environment and Planning C: Government and Policy 23: 3.

 

Conference papers, working papers and non-academic articles

  • (2009) Grover, D. Book review, Voluntary Carbon Markets, The Business Economist 41 (3).
     

  • (2009) ‘Long term trends in pollution abatement R&D spending by US industry: new evidence, description and analysis 1972-1998’. United Nations University DIME-RAL conference on technical change and the environment, Maastricht, Netherlands. Conference and working paper.
     

  • (2008) ‘The environment industry: theory and measurement’. Economic Geography Research Group Symposium, Manchester University, UK.  Conference and working paper.
     

  • (2009) ‘LSE shops use cut in VAT to boost green sales’. Comment in Financial Times on applying UK VAT reduction to environmentally responsible products.  January 10, 2009.
     

  • (2008) ‘The role of environmental goods and services firms in the uptake of environmental technology: evidence from the London Taxi Emissions Program’. European Regional Studies Association, University of Liverpool, UK. Conference paper.
     

  • (2007) ‘Someone is paying for ‘free’ dailies.’ Financial Times comment on externalised costs of London’s free daily newspapers.  February 12, 2007.
     

  • (2007) ‘Growth-oriented environmental policy and the EU environmental goods and services sector’. European Regional Studies Association, ESSEC Business School, Paris, France. Conference paper.

 

Teaching

  • GY140: Methods in spatial and social analysis

  • GY240: Research techniques: spatial, social and environmental analysis

  • GY350: Undergraduate independent research project

  • GY300: Theories of regional economic development

Quote of the month

'An increase in consumer debt is all but implicit in the process by which wants are now synthesized.  Advertising and emulation, the two dependent sources of desire, work across the society.  They operate on those who can afford and those who cannot.  With those who lack the current means, it is a brief and obvious step from stimulating their desire by advertising to making it effective in the market with a loan.  The relation of emulation to indebtedness is even more direct . . . .

'Viewing this process as a whole, we should expect that every increase in consumption will bring a further increase -- possibly a more than proportional one -- in consumer debt.  Our march to higher living standards will be paced, as a matter of necessity, by an ever deeper plunge into debt.  The evidence is already impressive . . . .

'As we expand debt in the process of want creation, we come necessarily to depend on this expansion.  An interruption in the increase in debt means an actual reduction in demand for goods.  Debt, in turn, can be expanded by measures which, in the nature of the case, cannot be indefinitely continued.  Periods for payment can be lengthened, although eventually there comes a point when they exceed the life of the asset which serves as the collateral.  Down payments can be reduced, but eventually there comes a point when the borrower's equity is so small that he finds it more convenient to allow repossession than to pay a burdensome debt or declare bankruptcy.  Poorer and poorer credit risks can be accommodated, but at last it becomes necessary to exclude the borrower who does not choose to pay . . . .

'No one can speak with confidence on the extent of the resulting danger.  However, few things are more satisfactorily established in economics than that debt creation, whether by producers or consumers, is a major source of uncertainty in economic behaviour.  It has long been recognized that times of high income and employment and a generally sanguine outlook are encouraging to both borrowers and lenders.  The spending that results from these transactions adds to the general total of purchasing power when, in effect, it is least needed.  Under less sanguine circumstances, loans are advanced more cautiously.  Instead of spending from new loans, there is repayment of old ones and this, as perversely as in prosperity, occurs at the least propitious time . . . .

'A possibility of trouble is not a prediction of trouble.  Not many, if told of the vast expansion in consumer debt when it lay ahead, would have thought it safe.  Perhaps the expansion can continue and possibly it will one day taper off in benign fashion.  But we would do well to keep an alarm signal flying over the consumer debt creation into which the process of want creation impels us.  In a society in which the production and sale of goods seem sacrosanct, there will be extreme hesitation over measures which will seem to restrain the financing of consumer's goods and hence their sale.  Measures to prevent the competitive liberalization of consumer credit will encounter the heaviest resistance.  When regarded in relation to the underlying interest in stability and economic security, such precautionary measures have a much stronger claim for attention.  They promise to help keep the process of synthesizing demand and the purchasing power to make it effective from damaging the continuity of production and employment . . . .

'Though such regulation is a commonplace in the United Kingdom and has been used in the past in the United States in wartime, it is unlikely to be authorized in the future except in the aftermath of disaster.  Interference with the process of want creation cum debt creation will be thought wrong.'

John Kenneth Galbraith (1958).  The Affluent Society.  Houghton Mifflin: Boston.  pp. 145-152.

 

Popper