Professor Gary Dymski

Profile

Background and pre-academic positions: I was born in 1953 in North Tonawanda, New York, USA, and completed my academic degrees there: Bachelor of Arts, University of Pennsylvania (urban studies, Phi Beta Kappa) 1975; Masters of Public Administration, Maxwell School, Syracuse University, 1977; PhD in Economics, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, 1987. Before commencing doctoral study in 1981, I held positions in institutional research (Syracuse University, 1975-77), legal advocacy and community organizing (Legal Services Organization of Indiana, 1977-79), and politics (Indiana State Senate, 1979-81). In the latter role I was staff director and fiscal analyst for the Democratic caucus, serving under Senator Frank O'Bannon, who subsequently was a twice-elected Governor of that state.

Academic positions: Leo Model Research Fellow in Economic Studies at the Brookings Institution, Washington DC, 1985-86; assistant professor of economics, University of Southern California, 1987-91; assistant professor of economics, University of California, Riverside (UCR), 1991-95; associate professor of economics, UCR, 1995-2000; professor of economics, UCR, 2000-2014. Leadership positions at UCR: associate dean for research and graduate studies in the College of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences, 2001-2; founding director of the UCR Center for Sustainable Suburban Development, 2002-03.

University of California Office of the President: founder and first executive director of the University of California Center, Sacramento (UCCS), 2003-2009. UCCS serves all 10 University of California campuses as the system’s academic public policy center in California's state capitol. In my period as director, UCCS trained over 600 scholar-interns from across the UC system and held more than 300 seminars, conferences, and workshops on wide range of policy challenges facing California and its government.

I joined the Leeds University Business School as Professor of Applied Economics in April 2012. I have been the University of Leeds representative on the Leeds City Council’s Third Sector Partnership since 2012, and in 2013 was a founder of Leeds ACTS, an academic collaboration between third-sector organizations and universities in Leeds. I have been an active member of the University of Leeds’ regional engagement projects: Y-PERN (Yorkshire Policy Engagement Research Network, 2020 to present), and YPIP (Yorkshire Policy Innovation Partnership, 2023-2026). I’m principal investigator of YPIP, a project that takes a communities-focused approach to inclusive growth, sustainability and climate change, and the role of culture and the creative industries in the Yorkshire region (and which includes 12 university partners and 26 co-investigators from multiple sectors).

I am an associate editor of Competition and Change and have been a member of several other editorial boards. I was elected and served as president of the Association for Evolutionary Economics in 2023-24. I've been a visiting scholar in universities and research centers in Australia, Brazil, Bangladesh, Colombia, Greece, India, Italy, Japan, Korea, Mexico, and France. I’m a faculty associate of the Erasmus Mundus EPOG project (2015 to present), and have been a member of the Intergovernmental Expert panel of the Debt and Development division, United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD), at four of its Geneva meetings since 2017, most recently in December 2025.

Responsibilities

• Principal Investigator, Yorkshire Policy Innovation Partnership
• University of Leeds representative, Leeds City Council Third Sector Partnership
• Member, Yorkshire and NE Advisory Board, The ESRC Productivity Institute

Research interests

I have published widely on topics including banking, financial fragility, urban development, credit-market discrimination, gender and racial inequality, the Latin American and Asian financial crises, exploitation, housing finance, the subprime lending crisis, financial regulation, the Eurozone crisis, and economic policy. Recent research projects include the UK productivity paradox; the impact and governance of global financial power; the spatial aspects of financial instability; the consequences of subprime lending and the Covid-19 crisis for minority and lower-income areas, the potential for wider communication between financial geography and political economy scholarship, and the challenge of financing more circular, equitable, and sustainable urban and national economies against the context of ever-deepening global inequalities.

Qualifications

• PhD, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, Economics, 1987
• M.P.A., Maxwell School, Syracuse University, Public Budgeting, 1977
• B.A., University of Pennsylvania, Urban Studies, 1975

Professional memberships

• Post Keynesian Economic Society
• American Economic Association
• Association for Evolutionary Economics
• American Association of Geographers
• Regional Studies Association
• Union for Radical Political Economics
• International Association for Feminist Economics
• National Economic Association

Student education

Since arriving at Leeds, I have led or participated in modules focusing on applied econometrics, global political economy, and international political economy, My doctoral supervisions at Leeds have focused on a range of issues, including financial in/exclusion, macroeconomic theory and policy, policy uncertainty, financial instability and crises, the European economy, international economics, inequality and stratification, and economic development.

Research groups and institutes

• Applied Institute for Research in Economics
• Y-PERN
• Ideas in Practice

Current postgraduate researchers

• Alexandra
• Iván Weigandi