Jan Rouwendal

Changes in Commuting Distances of Dutch Households

This paper is concerned with the analysis of commuting distances. The development of commuting distances has become a subject of political concern because of the large flows of traffic involved which are concentrated in a few hours each day and cause considerable congestion problems as well as environmental damage. The economic theory of search will be proposed as a theoretical background which motivates the modelling of commuting distance distributions. For the empirical analysis, a sub-sample is used of respondents of the Housing Demand Survey of 1985, approached again in 1988. Commuting distances are discussed in relation to household characteristics such as the number of persons, the presence of a spouse or partner and her/his employment status. The apparent rapid increase in commuting distances is due in large part to changes in the employment situation. People who change job will often commute over a longer distance after the change occurs. Changes in housing situation are more or less neutral in their effect on the average commuting distances.

Spatial job search and commuting distances

An empirical model for spatial job search is developed and estimated. The model allows for heterogeneous jobs. It can be extended to incorporate the effects of housing market search induced by acceptance of a job. In order to deal with unobserved heterogeneity among workers, the reservation utility level is treated as a random variable in the empirical work. The estimation procedure uses simulation in order to evaluate an otherwise cumbersome integral in the likelihood function. The model is estimated on a sample of married or cohabiting female workers in the Netherlands and takes into account wage rates, commuting distances and working hours as relevant job characteristics. Estimation results suggest, among other things, that workers are on average willing to accept an hourly wage rate that is 0.12 Dutch guilder lower in order to avoid one additional kilometre of commuting, that there are important spatial elements in the way vacant jobs are offered to workers and that workers in their early 30s have the highest arrival rates of job offers.

Block Rate Pricing of Water in Indonesia: An Analysis of Welfare Effects

Block rate pricing of piped water in Indonesian cities has a progressive structure: the marginal price paid increases with the volume of demand. This paper estimates household water demand in Salatiga city using the Burtless and Hausman model, and finds that its distribution is not unimodal—that data cluster around kinks. The main estimation results are a price elasticity of approximately–1.2 and an income elasticity of 0.05. These elasticities are mutually dependent. The estimated model is used to investigate the social welfare consequences of a shift to uniform pricing. The principal beneficiaries would be large households, which are not necessarily wealthy. While replacing the complex rate structure by a uniform marginal price would have positive effects on average welfare, the equity consequences would be small. To improve equity, water companies could reduce installation fees, giving low-income households access to water connections, or reinvest profits in network expansion to unserviced areas.

Housing Supply and Land Use Regulation in the Netherlands

In spite of a growing recognition of the importance of supply conditions for the level and volatility of house prices, empirical work on housing supply outside the US is scarce. This paper considers various measures of housing supply in the Netherlands, where real house prices have roughly tripled since 1970. Besides the volume of investment in residential structures, and new housing construction in units, we derive time series of structure and location quality in a hedonic analysis. Each of these variables appears to be almost fully inelastic with respect to house prices in at least the short to medium long run. Further analysis of the quality of location index shows that conventional models of competitive land and housing markets cannot account for these findings. However, they may be well explained in terms of the rather extensive body of interventions by the Dutch government.

The Impact of Mixed Land Use on Residential Property Values

This discussion paper led to a publication in the Journal of Regional Science (2012). Vol. 52(5), pages 733-761. Contemporary European urban planning policies aim to mix land uses in compact neighbourhoods. It is presumed that mixing land uses yields socio-economic benefits and therefore has a positive effect on housing values. In this paper, we investigate the impact of mixed land use on housing values using semiparametric estimation techniques. We demonstrate that a diverse neighbourhood is positively valued by households. There are various land use types which positively affect house prices, e.g. business services and leisure. Land uses that are incompatible with residential land use are, among others, manufacturing and wholesale. It appears that households are willing to pay up to 6 percent more for a house in a mixed neighbourhood than for an otherwise comparable house in a monofunctional area. We also show that there is substantial heterogeneity in willingness to pay for mixed land use. For example, apartment occupiers are willing to pay almost 25 percent more for diversity than households living in detached housing.

Heritage planning and spatial development in the Netherlands: changing policies and perspectives.

In recent years, the separation of heritage conservation concerns and spatial planning concerns – a spectre of post-war modernism – is being criticised. Numerous commentators argue that heritage conservation needs to rethink its purpose and role if it is to maintain its place in the planning system specifically and urban and rural development more generally. This paper analyses the Belvedere Memorandum and its incentive programme (1999–2009) by which the Dutch government actively encouraged the integration of heritage conservation with spatial planning. It is a first attempt to identify the impact of Belvedere on Dutch heritage planning practises. We argue that Belvedere has contributed to a reorientation of heritage conservation. At the same time, however, heritage conservation now faces new challenges as a result of the fact that the government is reducing its involvement in spatial planning, of a turn-around in socio-economic and demographic development (from growth to shrinkage) and of a crisis in property development. We believe Belvedere can be called a success only if the heritage sector manages, under these changed circumstances, to actively respond to spatial challenges and forge links with social actors.

The Costs and Benefits of Providing Open Space in Cities

Although many researchers have investigated the value of open space in cities, few of them have compared them to the costs of providing this amenity. In this paper, we use the monocentric model of a city to derive a simple cost-benefit rule for the optimal provision of open space. The rule is essentially the Samuelson-condition for the optimal provision of a public good, with the price of land as the appropriate indicator for its cost. The condition is made operational by computing the willingness to pay for public and private space on the basis of empirical hedonic price functions for three Dutch cities. The conclusions with respect to the optimal provision of open space differ between the three cities. Further investigation reveals that willingness to pay for parks and public gardens increases with income, although not as fast as that for private residential space.

Homeownership and labour-market behaviour: interpreting the evidence

This paper attempts to explain the repeated empirical finding that homeowners have shorter unemployment durations than tenants, even though Oswalds hypothesis predicts longer unemployment durations for homeowners. The search models that have been proposed to motivate Oswalds thesis have difficulties in providing an explanation for the reverse of the Oswald effect. The model proposed in this paper is close to the ones proposed earlier, in that it also studies search behaviour, but contains a richer set of effects of homeownership on search behaviour. In our model, homeowners may have a higher intensity of job search (and hence shorter unemployment durations) when their housing expenses are—all other things being equal—higher than those of tenants. Some studies have indeed found that the shorter unemployment durations occur especially among highly leveraged homeowners. We show that, in the Netherlands, many homeowners have higher housing costs than otherwise comparable tenants. The model developed in this paper is therefore able to explain the existing evidence of shorter unemployment durations for Dutch homeowners.

Second Best Pricing for Imperfect Substitutes in Urban Networks

This paper considers second-best pricing as it arises through incomplete coverage of full networks. The main principles are first reviewed by considering the classic two-route problem and some extensions that have been studied more recently. In most of these studies the competing routes are assumed to be perfect substitutes, which is probably not the case for most parallel roads in reality, and even less likely for the case where competing connections represent different transport modes. In this paper a modelling framework in which the alternatives are imperfect substitutes is developed and numerical results for two roads and two modes are presented. In the model, trip generation and trip distribution are distinguished in a way that is consistent with economic theory. The model is used to consider situations in which one route or mode cannot be tolled. Simulation results show that, for the chosen parameter values, there is a substantial difference between the effectiveness of policies in which the capacities have to be taken as given, and those in which capacity of at least one mode can be changed. A striking feature of the policy in which the capacities of both modes/routes and the railway fare/toll on one road can be used as policy instruments is the existence of two equilibria for a range of values of a. In one equilibrium there are substantial numbers of users of both modes, whereas in the other use of one mode is negligible.

Assessing the Value of Museums with a Combined Discrete Choice / Count Data Model

This article assesses the value of Dutch museums using information about destination choice as well as about the number of trips undertaken by an actor. Destination choice is analysed by means of a mixed logit model, and a count data model is used to explain trip generation. We use a utility-consistent framework in which the discrete choice model for destination choice is linked to an indirect utility function. The results are used to compute the compensating variation of particular museums and of the total group of museums in the sample.