Jessie Bakens

Economic Impacts of Cultural Diversity in the Netherlands: Productivity, Utility, and Sorting

This discussion paper resulted in an article in the Journal of Regional Science (2013). Volume 53, issue 1, pages 8-36. This paper identifies the role of cultural diversity in explaining spatial disparities in wages and housing prices across Dutch cities, using unique individual panel data of home owners. We distinguish between the effects of interactions-based productivity, consumption amenities and sorting of heterogeneous home owners while controlling for interactions between the labor and housing market. We find that an increase in the cultural diversity of the population positively impacts equilibrium wages and housing prices, particularly in the largest and most densely populated cities. This result is largely driven by spatial sorting of individuals in both the labor and housing market. After controlling for home owner heterogeneity we find that increasing cultural diversity no longer impacts local labor markets and negatively impacts local housing markets. The latter result is likely to be driven by a negative causal effect of increased cultural diversity on neighb orhood quality that outweighs a positive effect of increased cultural diversity in consumption goods.

Rewarding Peak Avoidance: The Dutch ‘Spitsmijden’ Projects

The Dutch road network is becoming increasingly congested. In late 2006, a group of companies, universities and government institutions established the Spitsmijden project. ‘Spitsmijden’ is the Dutch term for ‘avoiding the peak’. This joint initiative aimed to identify and assess a short-term solution that could extend the portfolio of transport policy instruments that may be used to manage temporal peaks in transport demand.

Use and validation of location-based services in urban research: An example with Dutch restaurants:

This article focuses on the use of big data for urban geography research. We collect data from the location-based service Foursquare in The Netherlands and employ it to obtain a rich catalogue of restaurant locations and other urban amenities, as well as a measure of their popularity among users. Because the Foursquare data can be combined with traditional sources of socio-economic data obtained from Statistics Netherlands, we can quantify, document and characterise some of the biases inherent in these new sources of data in the context of urban applications. A detailed analysis is given as to when this type of big data is useful and when it is misleading. Although the users of Foursquare are not representative of the whole population, we argue that this inherent bias can be exploited for research about the attractiveness of urban landscapes and consumer amenities in addition to the more traditional data on urban amenities.

Homophily horizons and ethnic mover flows among homeowners in Scotland

Abstract This article analyses mover flows in Glasgow and the role of ethnic homophily, the tendency for movers to be drawn to areas with similar ethnicities to their own. We look at how homophily affects the spatial relocation patterns of homeowners in Glasgow from Scottish, Indian, Pakistani and Chinese descent, and focus on the extent to which homophily extends beyond the immediate locality to surrounding neighbourhoods. Our interest is in estimating the “homophily horizon” – how far the gaze of homophily reaches in mover location decisions. Using a simple Schelling-type theoretical model, we argue that homophily horizons are potentially important in shaping the long-term social structure of cities as they may profoundly affect how potent the overall sorting tendencies of the housing market are in driving segregation. In principle, the more distant the homophily horizon, the more quickly the housing market will tend towards segregation, other things being equal. We adopt Folch and Rey’s use of the local centralization index to capture the influence of surrounding neighbourhoods in shaping mover flows and neighbourhood dynamics. Our estimation combines ethnic mover flows derived from surname analysis of house buyers from the house transactions recorded in Registers of Scotland data. Our results show that the presence of the own ethnic group in the local surroundings is important for explaining mover flows, and that homophily is a local phenomenon.

Spatial dynamics of cultural diversity in the Netherlands

In this paper, we analyse the spatial dimension of changing ethnic diversity at the neighbourhood level. Drawing from recent work on income convergence, we characterise the evolution of population diversity in the Netherlands over space. Our analysis is structured over three dimensions, which allow us to find clear spatial patterns in how cultural diversity changes at the neighbourhood level. Globally, we use directional statistics to visualise techniques of exploratory data analysis, finding a clear trend towards ‘spatially integrated change’: a situation where the trajectory of ethnic change in a neighbourhood is closely related to that in adjacent neighbourhoods. When we zoom into the local level, a visualisation of recent measures of local concordance allows us to document a high degree of spatial heterogeneity in how the overall change is distributed over space. Finally, to further explore the nature and characteristics of neighbourhoods that experience the largest amount of change, we develop a spatial, multilevel model. Our results show that the largest cities, as well as those at the boundaries with Belgium and Germany, with the most diverse neighbourhoods, have large clusters of stable neighbourhood diversity over time, while concentrations of high dynamic areas are nearby these largest cities. The analysis shows that neighbourhood diversity spatially ‘spills over’, gradually expanding outside traditionally diverse areas.

E Pluribus Prosperitas: on cultural diversity and economic development

We live in the age of migration: more than 3 per cent of the world’s population is nowadays recorded as an immigrant, and this percentage is likely to rise in the future because of our open and globalizing economies. It is noteworthy that – in contrast to the past centuries and decades in which migration was a geographically selective process (witness typical migration countries such as Canada, the USA, South Africa, Australia or New Zealand) – migration is at present a worldwide process, with great impacts on both the sending and receiving countries (see e.g. Nijkamp et al., 2012). A good illustration of the abovementioned trend can be found in Europe, which has faced significant migrationrelated population dynamics over the past 50 years. According to EUROSTAT (2011), net migration accounted for approximately 71 per cent of the total population increase in Europe in 2010, mainly as a result of the arrival of labour migrants in the search for more favourable economic opportunities. In 2010, Europe appears to have accommodated more than 32.5 million migrants, a significant share of them originating from nonEU member states. Migration motives have changed quite a bit over the years; from motives stemming from political suppression and (de)colonization in the past, to economic and family reunification motives nowadays. The nature of migration has changed quite a bit as well, with various forms of temporary and circular migration complementing, or substituting for, conventional oneway permanent migration (e.g. Poot et al., 2008). In the context of the European immigration policy, reference is often made to the Schengen Agreement (1986) and the Maastricht Treaty (1992). The Schengen Agreement essentially provides a communitarian perspective on open borders, but also indirectly covers a common immigration policy in terms of joint border control, work permits, family reunification, visa requirements and asylum rules. These views and agreements were later incorporated into the Maastricht Treaty as part of a

Migrant heterogeneity and urban development: A conceptual analysis

In this chapter we examine the contribution of immigrant heterogeneity to the attractiveness of cities from both the production and the consumption side. Based on an extensive literature review, we hypothesize that the interaction of people from different cultural groups in cities will increase labour productivity in line with the concepts of Jacobs externalities. For the consumption side of the model – a far less researched issue – we hypothesize that urban cultural diversity increases the heterogeneity in the private goods provided, which will increase the utility of living in that area. We argue that future research should focus on the interaction of people from different cultures in the workplace in order to determine urban productivity externalities, and on immigrant-induced product heterogeneity in a city in order to determine immigrant-induced urban amenities. To answer these questions, the use of micro datasets is inevitable.