Diego Puga is Research Professor at IMDEA Ciencias Sociales (the Social Sciences Division of the Madrid Institute for Advanced Studies). His main research areas are urban economics and international trade. In particular, his research has dealt with such issues as what makes firms and workers more productive in large cities; the role that diverse metropolis play in fostering innovation; the causes and consequences of urban sprawl; how regional inequalities evolve with economic integration, and the transformation of world trade patterns following the rise of incremental innovation in some low-wage countries. He is also studying interactions between geography, institutions and economic development in the context of, for instance, the slave trades in Africa or international trade in medieval Venice. His publications include articles in American Economic Review, Quarterly Journal of Economics, Economic Journal, European Economic Review, Journal of International Economics and Journal of Urban Economics and have been cited over 600 times in articles published by journals indexed in the Social Sciences Citation Index. Born in Spain, where he graduated in Economics at Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, Professor Puga obtained his Ph.D. in Economics from the London School of Economics in 1997. He has held full-time academic positions at the London School of Economics (as Lecturer in Economics and Postdoctoral Researcher at the Centre for Economic Performance), the University of Toronto (as a tenure-track Assistant Professor and then as tenured Associate Professor of Economics), and Universitat Pompeu Fabra (as Visiting Professor of Economics). In addition to those institutions, he has also taught at Northwestern University, Norges Handelshøyskole, Universidad Carlos III de Madrid, and Università Bocconi. In 2000, Dr Puga was awarded the John Charles Polanyi Prize, and in 2005 the Geoffrey J. D. Hewings Award, given by the North American Regional Science Council for distinguished contributions to research in regional science. Professor Puga is also Director of the International Trade and Regional Economics Programme of the Centre for Economic Policy Research, the leading European research network in Economics. He served as Editor of the Journal of Economic Geography from 2003 to 2007, during which term this publication achieved the third highest impact factor of all journals in Economics and the first in Geography. He has advised the European Commission, the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) and the World Bank on topics related to his research.