Faculty of Economics and Business

Nicolás Durán dedicated his PhD research to investigating what the indirect and overlooked effects from earthquakes induced by gas extraction are on the housing market and successfully defended his thesis on May 12th. In this blog article, Durán reflects on the research process and discusses his findings.  

Convergence is the process of levelling living standards, economic as well as social, across multiple countries or regions. It implies that, over time, differences in given development outcomes shrink. A study by FEB-researcher Konstantin M. Wacker, Jesus Crespo Cuaresma (Vienna University of Economics and Business) and the late Stephan Klasen (University of Göttingen) explains why countries starting out with high poverty rates often do not achieve a higher proportionate reduction in poverty.

Chi Nguyen is a PhD students who ispart of the CONTRAST project. Her research will focus on the economic evaluations of stroke care treatments and their organization in the Netherlands. She works along with PhD student Willemijn Maas from the UMCG.

The notion of knowledge spillovers has been very influential in shaping research and in motivating innovation policies all over the globe, yet it isn’t the only manner in which knowledge (from R&D) diffuses in the current innovation landscape. Knowledge also often diffuses through voluntary technology transfers. FEB-researcher Pere Arque-Castells and Daniel Spulber, a colleague from Northwestern University (US, Illinois), take both channels into account and study their implications on innovation policies and the innovation landscape as a whole.

FEB researchers Durk-Jouke van der Zee and Erik Buskens joined forces with their colleagues Maarten Lahr and Maarten Uyttenboogaart from the University Medical Center Groningen (UMCG) to work on new solutions for organizing regional acute stroke care, thereby participating in externally funded projects.

Last week on our blog, we featured the book Sjoerd Beugelsdijk wrote about polarization in the Netherlands. Beugelsdijk  was one of Juliette de Wit’s supervisors during her PhD research. Her PhD thesis also looks at the same topic. She found three different profiles that capture the way the Dutch identify with the Netherlands. And it seems that we have more in common than we think.

Although knotty crisis situations are increasing in frequency, duration, and impact, their implications for operations management remain ill-understood. Having read a lot about the great failures of humanitarian organizations in responding to major disasters, Nonhlanhla Dube set out to investigate exactly how badly they performed in terms of timeliness in delivering assistance where it is needed. The researcher, who is affiliated both to FEB and Lancaster University, studied the response of international humanitarian organizations from the viewpoint of supply chain resilience.

Polarization is a hot topic. Sjoerd Beugelsdijk wrote a book about it (De Verdeelde Nederlanden) and it has been discussed extensively in Dutch media. The Volkskrant recently gave his book 5 stars

Sport participation seems to be an important means to improve health, decrease health inequalities and reduce average health care costs, Willem de Boer’s research shows. The sports economist, who is affiliated with both FEB and the HAN University of Applied Sciences, studied different types of physical activity and the ways in which they affected health outcomes, health inequalities and health care costs.