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…

The master Spatial, Transport, and Environmental Economics (usually abbreviated as STREEM) obtained the bronze medal in de EW Beste Studies 2022. This means in fact that STREEM is one of the best Economics Masters, and the best Applied Economics Master. EW Best Studies 2022 analyzed 2,273 bachelor’s and master’s degree programmes. 340 individual programmes at…

In 2019, Diego Candia Riquelme joined our department as PhD student, supervised by Erik Verhoef. Diego studied industrial engineering and completed a master in transportation engineering at the University of Chili. What exactly do you study? I mostly do modelling on urban congestion, and interaction with labour taxes for now. The more general framework of that…

Joëlle Noailly, Gerard van der Meijden and Steven Poelhekke have been awarded a research grant from the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF) for the project “Critical Minerals and the Clean Energy Transition”. A major obstacle to the energy transition often overlooked is the critical reliance of future clean energy systems on a few essential minerals,…

MObility during and after COrona LOckDOwn (abbreviated as MOCOLODO) was a research project, addressing urgent (policy) questions about mobility in corona times. The project run from September 15, 2020 to September 15, 2022, and united researchers from different universities in close cooperation with a number of societal partners. Results The project MOCOLODO looked at (1)…

Raúl Ramos is an ERASMUS exchange PhD candidate from Colombia studying at the Catholic University in Chile. He has been with us since November 2021, and will leave in September 2022. Asking what exactly made him come to the VU, he answers: ‘My advisor in Chile – Hugo Silva – did his Ph.D. here. He…