Dr Florian Ploeckl is Senior Lecturer in the School of Economics at the University of Adelaide. Dr Ploeckl received his PhD from Yale University and was a postdoctoral research fellow at Oxford before moving to Adelaide.
His research and teaching focuses on the role of Economic Geography within Economic History and the spatial patterns of long-term economics development. The main focus of his current work is the importance of the postal service for economic activity in the 19th century. Particular aspects center on the relevance of information flows for trade, capital and labour flows during the First Globalization and the Interwar period. On a local level he utilizes postal data on information and communication to better understand the spatial structure of the economy in particular urban systems.
Towns and cities are also a second concentration of his research. His work investigates the definition, location, size and long-term growth of towns. In particular the role of geographic endowments and agglomeration effects on town size is one focus of his research. Geographically this work is mostly focused on Germany, in particular Saxony.
A third strand of research is the Zollverein, the first international customs union formed by German states in 1834. Building on his dissertation research, he looks at the role of geography on the political economy of its formation, the impact it had on regional growth patterns, and spatial structures of early industrialization.
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