On April 8, 2024, the kick-off meeting of research project ENHANCE took place at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. ENHANCE, short for ‘Enhancing Sustainable Travel in Small Cities and Outer Metropolitan Areas’, started in January 2024, and unites researchers from Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam (lead), University College London, Birkbeck University of London, and Universidade Nova de Lisboa. In…

Congratulations Antonia Kurz! She had her first article on ‘Within-country leakage due to the exemption of small emitters from emissions pricing’ published in The Journal of Environmental Economics and Management. More good news: Antonia accepted a six-year postdoc position at DIW Berlin as per September 2024. At DIW Berlin Antonia will pursue and lead innovative…

Good news for Michael König! His paper on “Endogenous Technology Spillovers in Dynamic R&D Networks” (co-authored by Chih-Sheng Hsieh and Xiaodong Liu) has been accepted for publication in the RAND Journal of Economics. The abstract is provided below. Abstract   We introduce a stochastic R&D network formation model where firms choose both R&D efforts and…

What would you do? Say you’re about to move, but your current home hasn’t sold yet. Do you opt for a low asking price, which means a quick sale at a low(er) but acceptable price? Or do you opt for a higher asking price and wait for higher bids? Hans Koster and Jan Rouwendal investigated…

The School of Business and Economics (SBE) at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam (VUA) had the honour of welcoming esteemed guests from the Faculty of Economics and Business, University of Indonesia (FEBUI) on November 14, 2023. This significant visit, led by Dr. Teguh Dartanto, Dean of FEBUI, along with Dr. Isfandiarni Rosidin (Director of the International Undergraduate…

On 14 November, Stuart Donovan successfully defended his PhD thesis on Ties that bind and fray: Agglomeration economies and location choice at the Auditorium of Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. Promotors were Henri L.F. de Groot, Carl Koopmans, and Thomas de Graaff. Why does an increasing share of the population live in cities? Why do some cities…

On Sunday, October 29, Mathieu Steijn was interviewed by the Dutch Radio Swammerdam to talk about the question: How have the benefits of cities changed in recent decades? And who actually benefits from them? Mathieu talked about his PhD research into the changing benefits of cities, how technological revolutions have changed work and industries and…

An article on ‘The welfare effects of Greenbelt policy – Evidence from England’, authored by Hans Koster, is forthcoming in the Economic Journal. The central research question driving this article revolves around the debate concerning whether imposing restrictions on urban expansion is a good idea or not. Green areas around cities where construction is forbidden –…

A blog post on diversification of regions in times of crises has just been published by the London School of Economics (LSE United States Centre). It is based on the article “Technological Diversification of U.S. Cities during the Great Historical Crises” that Spatial Economics’ Mathieu Steijn wrote with Pierre-Alexandre Balland, Ron Boschma, and David Rigby…

How to handle the lack of affordable housing in the Amsterdam Metropolitan Area? Simply building more is not the only solution, according to Henri de Groot in the Dutch AT5 tv programme Bouw Woon Leef.  We need to look at a more fair distribution of the number of square meters in a city, he says.…