Drowning behind the Dykes? Flooding Risks and Dutch Housing Prices

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• Prof Harry Garretsen from University of Groningen
• Thursday 29 April 2010, 16:00-17:00
• Mill Lane Lecture Rooms, Room 1.

If you have a question about this talk, please contact Ellen Ihrig.

About the speaker: Harry Garretsen (1962) got his MA and PhD in economics at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands. His PhD dissertation deals with the (im)possibility to arrive at a microfoundation for Keynes’ (as opposed to Keynesian) economics. His interest in geographical economics or, as it is more widely known, the new economic geography initially came from the similarities between Krugman’s 1991 model and the work on coordination failures in new Keynesian economics which has a central place in his 1991 PhD-dissertation. He met Steven Brakman and Charles van Marrewijk during his days as a PhD student in Groningen and from 1991 onwards he started to work with them on the new economic geography. Apart from publications in various journals the present book is his main work on geographical economics. Besides geographical economics Garretsen has done and continues to do research on the role of capital market imperfections for investment and monetary policy. Lately he has also been engaged in research on financial institutions. After the completion of his PhD Garretsen worked as an assistant professor at the Department of Economics at the University of Groningen (1991-1993) and as a senior policy staff member at the Dutch central bank (1993-1996). At the beginning of 1996 he became a professor of economics at the University of Nijmegen in the Netherlands, where he worked until September 2002. He then moved to Utrecht University (2002-2008), and subsequently to the University of Groningen (since 2008), where he is professor of international economics and business.

About the seminar: Following a trend in the social sciences at large, research in spatial economics and geography has started to use “natural” experiments as sources of exogenous variation. Both 1st nature geography and policy induced shocks have been used to set up the (quasi-) experiments. In this project, we take the (expected) flooding risks for the case of the Netherlands and investigate the impact on Dutch housing prices. To do so, we develop a rich data set that combines unique data on flooding risks with very detailed data on housing prices. The first preliminary results suggest that Dutch housing prices are indeed (negatively) affected by flooding risk.

This talk is part of the Land Economy Seminar Series series.

This talk is included in these lists:

• AUB_Cambridge Seminars
• Land Economy Seminar Series
• Mill Lane Lecture Rooms, Room 1

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