IN THIS EDITION

Newsletter VU Spatial Economics NO. 3, 2014

Welcome
Research Funding: New Projects
AWARDS AND NOMINATIONS
OTHER ACHIEVEMENTS
DISSERTATIONS
STREEM NEWS
Policy oriented RESEARCH
scientific PUBLICATIONS; a selection
Policy Oriented Publications; a Selection

The department in 2013

This newsletter highlights some of the main research achievements of the department of Spatial Economics at VU University Amsterdam in 2013. Besides being proud of the different achievements of the department in 2013, published in this newsletter, we were deeply saddened by the loss of Piet Rietveld, Professor in Transport Economics and Head of our Department. Piet passed away, after a short period of illness, on November 1, 2013. Piet was dearly beloved by everyone who has had the privilege to work with him, for his wisdom, his warm personality, his gentleness, and his sense of humour. He is deeply missed.

Erik Verhoef, Acting Head of the Department

Regional Dimensions in Indonesia's Social and Economic Development

Henri de Groot and Peter Mulder have received funding for the project ‘Regional Dimensions in Indonesia’s Social and Economic Development: A Governance Approach’. This is part of the Scientific Programme Indonesia – Netherlands (SPIN) from the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW), aimed at scientific cooperation with Indonesia. Two PhD-students will be working on this project.

Home Equity and the Demand for and Cost of Long Term Care

Jan Rouwendal received funding from NETSPAR for the project Home equity and the demand for and cost of long term care’. Lexmy van den Boogaard, PhD student, will be working on the project for 3 years. The project aims at a better understanding of the various mutual relationships between wealth and the demand for long run term care and of the possibilities for combining home equity and long term care.

Funding for PhD position in collaborative programme with China

Vincent van den Berg and Erik Verhoef have received funding for a PhD position in the collaborative programme between the Dutch NWO and the Chinese NSFC on “The Application of Operations Research in Urban Transport”. The project on “Private roads in mixed private-public networks” will be conducted in cooperation with Tongji University in Shanghai, China. The researcher is Xinying Fu. The project will consider the performance of monopolistic but also competing private roads in congested networks; and of various regulatory policies in this context, including different types of auctions for concessions for private road supply.

Hans Koster, Paul Koster and Gerard van der Meijden joined Tinbergen Institute as Junior and Candidate Fellow

Mark Kagan University Research Fellow

Mark Kagan has been selected for the University Research Fellowship (URF) of VU University.

Top five REPEC ranking

The Department of Spatial Economics at VU University Amsterdam is a world player in the domains of Spatial, Transport and Environmental Economics. REPEC ranks the Faculty in the top 5% of the world in the following domains in which the department is active: Transport Economics, Tourism Economics, Economic Geography, Environmental Economics, Energy Economics, and Urban and Real Estate economics. For the Transport Economics field it even achieves position 3 worldwide.

No less than 8 professors from the Department are ranked by REPEC in the top 5% of Economics authors of the world, namely Peter Nijkamp, Richard Tol, Rick van der Ploeg, Piet Rietveld, Henri de Groot, Cees Withagen, Erik Verhoef,  and Raymond Florax.

CLUE: highest scores in international research visitation

The department of Spatial Economics is actively involved in CLUE, which is a research institute for the heritage and history of the Cultural Landscape and Urban Environment.

 “World leading”, “at the forefront of their field internationally”, “clear leadership” and “excellent productivity”. These are some of the high qualifications for CLUE´s research that resulted from the research visitation in December 2012 (see 'Appendices' in Annual Report 2012). The committtee published its report in March 2013 and judged CLUE research on scientific quality, productivity, societal relevance and viability the label ´excellent´, a label that is quite rare in international evaluations of Dutch research.

Meer informatie:Website CLUE

New Editorships

Cees Withagen has been appointed associate editor of the European Economic Review from 1 January 2013.

In 2013, Raymond Florax became member of the International Editorial Board of the new journal "Regional Studies, Regional Science", published by Routledge/Taylor&Francis.

Spitsmijden

Spitsmijden in de Trein is a research project studying the use of rewards to influence train travel behaviour. For this experiment, we cooperated with various railway companies, consultants, other researchers, and the Ministry of I&M (Infrastructure and Environment). More than 500 regular train travellers participated to the experiment, where they could receive a daily reward between 3 and 9 euro to avoid travelling during the rush hours.
Travel behaviour during the experiment was registered using a customised smartphone app, as well as travel diaries and surveys. A reduction of 22% in the share of rush hour trips was observed during the reward period.
In the study we use discrete choice analysis to identify detailled behavioural models, from which we can derive monetary valuations of a series of trip characteristics, including comfort, punctuality, travel time and schedule delay. These values are a measure for the trade-offs that train travellers make in choosing between different train connections for their commute.
The results of the research project potentially have a wide range of policy applications, both in social cost benefit analysis of congestion relief measures, as well as in prediction of behavioural impact of tariff differentiation across time of day.

A Dutch summary of the project's main results can be found here.

Completion of NICIS projects

The Department has been involved in various research projects that were carried out as part of a huge project under the heading of the Netherlands Institute for City Innovation Studies (NICIS), ranging from valuation of cultural heritage to the impact of globalization on urban labor markets and the role of policy competition between local governments.

In the concluding phase of these projects, this not only resulted in a series of successful PhD defenses (see the list of PhD theses in this newsletter), but also several workshops aimed at dissemination of research results to policy makers and practitioners.

In June 2013, we organized a workshop on spatial sorting. The trend of high-skilled and high-income people to cluster in space is a well-established stylized fact. But what are the consequences for society? Is gentrification and segregation a source of concern or can we argue that the Dutch have gone too far in its ambition to spread people across space? What are the consequences for housing market policies in, for example, a city like Amsterdam with a huge amount of social housing? And what are the consequences for more peripheral regions if clustering is accepted as an unavoidable outcome of people that vote with their feet? The publication ‘Soort zoekt Soort’ (Sorting Matters: the Clustering of Like-Minded) resulting from this workshop is freely available (in Dutch).

In January 2014, we organized a symposium on ‘Regional and Spatial Policy in Transition: New Perspectives on the Role of Regions, Place Based Policies, Policy Competition and Decentralization’. The central theme was the change in view over the past few years on sound national as well as European policies. These changes reflect an increasingly important role of regions at sub-national level in a world that globalizes at high pace. The result is a clear trend towards decentralization of policies. There has been a fierce debate on the need for place based policies in the European context. And views on the beneficial role of competition between jurisdictions for social welfare have been questioned. Four scholars reflected on the current, complex transition from national to increasingly local policy making. A short impression of the symposium and the powerpoints of the presentations are available here.

AESUS - a research project of the Urban Regions in the Delta programme (NWO)

The Analysing and Exploring Sustainable Urban Strategies (AESUS) project aims to develop a new generation of models that integrate societal developments, urban processes and changes in accessibility with sustainability issues. Such models can be used to better understand the complexity of reality, help shed light on potential future developments and evaluate possible impacts of alternative development strategies.

In the Netherlands several models are available that describe part of the complex relationship between urban dynamics and sustainability. Currently, however, these are not equipped to deal with contemporary spatial development issues and recent changes in the policy context (e.g. deregulation, decentralisation) in which these developments unfold. Nor are these models used in combination to offer an integrated view on the sustainability issues related to urban development. Within this project we aim to improve existing models and apply them in an integrated way to better understand increasing regional differences in urban development and propose and evaluate different urbanisation strategies. This is done in the context of expected developments along the hinterland-corridor surrounding the A2 motorway that connects Amsterdam with Belgium.

Anthoff, D. & Tol, R.S.J. (2013). The uncertainty about the social cost of carbon: A decomposition analysis using fund. Climatic Change, 117(3), 515-530.

Bernasco, W., Block, R. & Ruiter, S. (2013). Go Where the Money is: Modeling Street Robbers’ Location Choices. Journal of Economic Geography, 13(1), 119-143.

Bremer, T.S. van den & Ploeg, F. van der (2013). Managing and Harnessing Volatile Oil Windfalls. IMF Economic Review, 61(1), 130-167.

Brown, Jason P., Dayton M. Lambert, Raymond Florax (2013), The Birth, Death and Persistence of Firms: Creative Destruction and the Spatial Distribution of U.S, Manufacturing Establishments, 2000–2006, Economic Geography, 89(3), 2013, 203–26

Chen Susan E., Raymond Florax and Samantha D. Snyder Obesity and Fast Food in Urban Markets: A New Approach Using Geo-referenced Micro Data, Health Economics, 22(7), 2013, 835–56.

Groot, S.P.T., de Groot, H.L.F. & Smit, M.J. (in press): Regional Wage Differences in the Netherlands: Micro Evidence on Agglomeration Externalities, Journal of Regional Science.

Heilbich, M., Brunauer, W., Vaz, E & Nijkamp, P. (2014). Spatial Heterogeneity in Hedonic House Price Models: The Case of Austria. Urban Studies, 51(2), 390-411.

Koster, H.R.A., Van Ommeren, J.N., Rietveld, P. (2013). Is the Sky the Limit? High-Rise Buildings and Office Rents. Forthcoming in Journal of Economic Geography.

Mitra, T., G. Asheim, W. Buchholz, C. Withagen, 'Characterizing the sustainability problem in an exhaustible resource model", Journal of Economic Theory  148, 2164-2182, 2013.

Mulalic, I, J.N. van Ommeren and N. Pilegaard (2013), Wages and commuting: quasi-natural experiments' evidence from firms that relocate, The Economic Journal (forthcoming).

Peer, S., Knockaert, J., Koster, P.R., Tseng, Y. & Verhoef, E.T. (2013). Door-to-door travel times in RP departure time choice models: An approximation method using GPS data. Transportation Research Part B, 58, 134-150.

Ploeg, F. van der & Venables, A.J. (2013). Absorbing a windfall of foreign exchange: Dutch disease dynamics. Journal of Development Economics, 103, 229-243.

Poelhekke, S. and F. van der Ploeg, (2013). "Do natural resources attract non-resource FDI?", The Review of Economics and Statistics, 95(3), 1047-1065.

Sabir, M., Ommeren, J.N. van & Rietveld, P. (2013). Weather to travel to the beach. Transportation Research A, 58, 79-86.

Rouwendal, Mark van Duijn,Cultural heritage and the location choice of Dutch households in a residential sorting model. Journal of Economic Geography, 13 (2013), 473-500. 

Silva Montalva, H.E., Verhoef, E.T. & Berg, V.A.C. van den (2014). Airlines' strategic interactions and airport pricing in a dynamic bottleneck model of congestion. Journal of Urban Economics, 80, 13-27.

Tol, R.S.J. (2013). The economic impact of climate change in the 20th and 21st centuries. Climatic Change, 117(4), 795-808.

Tranos, E. & Nijkamp, P. (2013). The Death of Distance Revisited: Cyberplace, Physical and Relational Proximities. Journal of Regional Science, 53(5), 855-873.

Weijde, A.H. van der, Verhoef, E.T. & Berg, V.A.C. van den (2013). Competition in multi-modal transport networks: A dynamic approach. Transportation Research Part B, 53, 31-44.

Withagen, C.A.A.M. & Ploeg, F. van der (in press). Growth, renewables and the optimal carbon tax. International Economic Review.

Bakens, J., H.L.F. de Groot, C.J. Pen en P. Mulder (eds.) (2014), Soort zoekt soort, Clustering en sociaal-economische scheidslijnen in Nederland, Platform 31 en Vrije Universiteit.

Economische Zaken Amsterdam and Kamer van Koophandel Amsterdam (2014): Economische Verkenningen Metropoolregio Amsterdam 2014 [Economic Outlook Metropolitan Area Amsterdam 2014], Economische Zaken Amsterdam / Kamer van Koophandel Amsterdam.

Geurs, K., Koster, H.R.A., De Visser, G. (2013). Kantorenleegstand en OV-knooppuntontwikkeling in de Zuidelijke Randstad. VerDus Beleidsnotitie.

Husby, T.G., Groot, H.L.F. de, Hofkes, M.W. & Dröes, M.I. (in press). Do floods have permanent effects? Evidence from the Netherlands. Journal of Regional Science.

Jacobs-Crisioni, C.G.W., Rietveld, P. & Koomen, E. (2014). The impact of spatial aggregation on urban development analyses. Applied Geography, 47, 46-56.

Koopmans, C.C., Groot, W., Warffemius, P., Annema, J.A. & Hoogendoorn-Lanser, S. (2013). Measuring Generalised Transport Costs as an Indicator of Accessibility Changes over Time. Transport Policy, 29(September), 154-159.

Mulder, P. & de Groot, H.L.F. (2013) Dutch Sectoral Energy Intensity Developments in International Perspective, 1987–2005, Energy Policy, 52, pp. 501–512.

Pfeiffer, B. and P. Mulder (2013), Explaining the Diffusion of Renewable Energy Technology in Developing Countries, Energy Economics 40, pp. 285–296.

Steenbruggen, J.G.M., Borzacchiello, M.T., Nijkamp, P. & Scholten, H.J. (2013). Data from Telecommunication Networks for Incident Management: An Exploratory Review on Transport Safety and Security. Transport Policy, 28(July), 86-102.

Tan, W., Koster, H.R.A, Van Hoogerbrugge, M. (eds.) (2013). Knooppuntontwikkeling in Nederland. (Hoe) moeten we TOD implementeren? ‘s-Gravenhage: Platform 31, uitgegeven op 14-september-2013.

Wee, B. van & Rietveld, P. (2013). Using value of statistical life for the ex ante evaluation of transport policy options: a discussion based on ethical theory. Transportation, 40(2), 295-314.

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