Spatial Economics’ Eric Koomen and former postdoc Dani Broitman won the VOGON Award 2020 for the best paper in the magazine Real Estate Research Quarterly. The paper (in Dutch) ‘Stedelijke centra magneten voor woningen‘ (translated as: Urban centers magnets for homes) contributes to the social debate about housing production. The Committee praises the clear analysis…

How much support is there for the introduction of tradeable peak credits in order to solve congestion? Lizet Krabbenborg (former PhD candidate at Delft University of Technology, currently researcher at KiM) conducted research into this question, which resulted in a thesis entitled Tradable Credits for Congestion Management: support/reject? Lizet was involved in research project U-SMILE – Urban Smart…

In recent research, Jan Rouwendal and Maureen Lankhuizen examine developments in rents and returns in the private rented sector. The private rented sector had little room to manoeuvre in the Dutch housing market after the Second World War. It was hemmed in between a sizeable social rental sector and a tax-advantaged owner-occupied sector. In recent…

Smart mobility could make policy objectives be achieved faster and more efficiently. In order to assess these promises and to exploit the potential it is necessary to equip professionals involved in policy making and delivery with a solid set of knowledge and methods. For this purpose, an e-course for policy makers designed, presenting the key…

The current corona pandemic has a huge impact on our society and the economy. The Dutch economy shrank with 8.5% in the second quarter of 2020, while the IMF has predicted that the overall world economy will shrink by 4.9% this year. Although the vaccination program is slowly picking up steam, the pandemic is far…

What are the effects of the city wide parking prices increases that were implied in Amsterdam in April 2019? This is the main question that Leonardo Nunes addresses  in his master thesis on ’Parking policy: Evidence from Amsterdam’.  In order to answer this question, he used transaction data to investigate how these price increases affected parking…

Filipe Batista e Silva is a PhD candidate at SPINlab working for the European Union’s Joint Research Centre. Over the past years he worked on uncovering temporal changes in Europe’s population density patterns using a data fusion approach. He combines official statistics with geospatial data from emerging sources to produce and validate a European Union-wide…

Scholars from various scientific disciplines work on understanding the impact of air pollution. Most of the studies focus on long-term health consequences, but there is now increasing attention for immediate effects on labour productivity, physical effort, cognitive performance, and decision-making. At the spatial economics department, Jos van Ommeren and Joris Klingen recently contributed to this…

The Covid-19 crisis has gripped the entire world. Major sources of contamination in China and Europe are often found in areas where there is air pollution. One of the many questions that the virus raises is therefore: Is there a connection between air pollution and the degree of susceptibility to Covid-19? Bo Andree investigated this question…

It often comes different than one hopes, and sometimes even worse than one fears. The Covid-19 crisis is more and more being used to roll back existing environmental regulations. Brazil is reducing environmental enforcement for deforestation. Poland may not continue its green transition for the time being. Donald Trump is revoking environmental regulation in the…