Publications

Infrastructure projects are increasingly aiming to improve liveability, in particular in urban areas. We analyse a specific case in which an existing highway in an urban area was moved underground in order to improve intercity traffic flows and to reduce traffic externalities. →

Flood prevention policy is of crucial importance to the Netherlands. We assess economical optimal flood prevention where multiple barrier dams and dikes protect the hinterland against sea level rise and peak river discharges. Current optimal flood prevention methods only consider dike rings with no dependencies between dikes. We propose a graph-based model for a cost-benefit analysis to determine optimal dike heights with multiple dependencies between dikes and barrier dams. →

In the Dutch health care system health insurers negotiate with hospitals about the pricing of hospital products in a managed competition framework. In this paper, we study these contract prices that became for the first time publicly available in 2016. The data show substantive price variation between hospitals for the same products, and within a hospital for the same product across insurers. →

The Dutch economy is gathering steam. The economic boom is the result of a favourable international economy, low interest rates, expansive budgetary policy and a persistently strong housing market. These last two factors distinguish the Netherlands from other countries. →

Productivity growth is on the decline, in the OECD countries. In the Netherlands, structural growth is also slowing down. On the basis of this fact, the European Commission proposed that each EU Member State would install a national productivity board (NPB). The Council of the European Union has since adopted this proposal. →

The long-term interest rate in the Euro area is an important exogenous input in CPB macro-econometric models to project the world economy and the Dutch economy, so it is important to have a reliable projection for it. However, there were concerns about the CPB practice of forecasting the long-term interest rate, especially over the inconsistency of long-term interest rate projections in the short and medium term. Therefore, this document compares the old CPB practice with several alternative forecasting methods for long-term interest rates, and evaluates these methods. →

The Dutch economy is gathering steam. The economic boom is the result of a favourable international economy, low interest rates, expansive budgetary policy and a persistently strong housing market. These last two factors distinguish the Netherlands from other countries. Positive domestic dynamics between increasing employment, higher disposable income levels, higher consumption and more investments will lead to a 3.2% economic growth in 2018 and 2.7% in 2019. Over the 2017–2019 period, the Dutch economy is projected to outperform that of the eurozone by 0.6 percentage points, in each of those years.  →

The Dutch economy is gathering steam. The economic boom is the result of a favourable international economy, low interest rates, expansive budgetary policy and a persistently strong housing market.... →

The existence of an urban wage growth premium is a well-established empirical fact. This article challenges the conventional view that faster wage growth for urban workers is caused by human capital spillovers. →

This article argues that the spatial scope of agglomeration economies is much more complex than is often assumed in the agglomeration literature. We provide insight into this issue by analyzing panel data on individual wages with a high level of spatial detail. →