Wednesday 29 April 2026 6:00pm to 7:30pm
St Catharine's College Ramsden Room
About
Date: 29 April 2026
Time: 18:00 -19:30
Speaker: Dr Hannah Hasenberger
Talk Title: “Downloaded austerity and constrained entrepreneurialism: tracing the uneven impacts of fiscal retrenchment on English local government"
Location: Ramsden room, St Catharine's College
Talk Overview:
This paper examines how English local authorities responded to post-2010 austerity. Using a continuous dynamic difference-in-differences design and panel data from 2007–2023, we show that more exposed councils implemented deeper and more persistent cuts to discretionary services, while social care remained comparatively protected, consistent with accounts of ‘austerity urbanism’. We find limited evidence of a shift towards entrepreneurial revenue strategies: increases in tax revenues were modest, while commercial income and borrowing grew more slowly in more exposed areas. Overall, austerity did not enable greater recovery, fiscal self-reliance or innovation, but instead constrained local governments’ capacity, undermining the policy narratives used to justify these reforms.
Paper Authors: Hannah Hasenberger (University of Cambridge),Hulya Dagdeviren (University of Hertfordshire) and Mia Gray (University of Cambridge)
Speaker Overview:
Hannah Hasselberger is an economic geographer drawing from a range of disciplinary perspectives and methods to explore the interactions between states and markets at different geographical scales. Also with interest in the political economy of rental housing markets. An ongoing research project explores how English local councils navigated austerity cuts and ongoing budget pressure post-2010.
Hannah is currently a Teaching Associate in Economic Geography at the University of Cambridge, has previously worked at University College London in the Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose and King’s College London in the Department of International Development