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.…

Recently a NBER paper on ‘Robots and workers: Evidence from the Netherlands‘ was published by Daron Acemoglu, Hans Koster and Ceren Ozgen. What exactly is this research about and why is it so important? We asked co-author Hans Koster. ‘Industrial robots are autonomous machines that are used in manufacturing in order to produce goods’, says…

For his research proposal  ‘Restricting raw material exports — bad for the world, good at home?’  Spatial Economics’ Steven Poelhekke (projectleader) together with Maarten Bosker (Erasmus University  Rotterdam) and Paul Pelzl (Norwegian School of Economics) received funding from the NWO 2022 Open Competition SSH – M funding round. Summary Industrial raw materials such as copper,…

After the publication of the Keuzegids 2023 on 9 March it turned out that students are very satisfied with the master  Spatial, Transport & Environmental Economics (STREEM). In particular, STREEM scores maximum on content and assessment. Both components receive the maximum ‘++’ score. In addition to the bronze medal of EW Best Studies, this is…

On Friday the 10th of February 2023, the first edition of the Dutch Environmental And Resource Economist (DEARE) Day took place. After a successful small-scale workshop in Tilburg in March 2022, this year the event scaled up in size and took place at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, organized by Sacha den Nijs, Gerard van der Meijden…

Yuzhi Yang joined our department in September 2021 to work on a research project about river pollution management, under supervision of Steven Poelhekke and Erik Ansink. Her background is quite unusual: ‘I grew up in a Buddhist shrine, Wutai Mountain in Shanxi province of China. On my eighteenth, I went to Harbin Institute of Technology…