Frank van Oort appointed endowed professor Urban and Regional Economics

Van Oort obtained his PhD from Erasmus University Rotterdam in 2002 with a thesis on agglomeration benefits and innovation in cities. He then moved to Utrecht University, first as university (senior) lecturer and later as professor of Urban Economics and director of the Urban & Regional Research Center Utrecht. He will continue to spend one day a week working in that capacity in Utrecht, where he is still supervising several PhD students. Until 2013, Frank van Oort also worked for the PBL Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency in The Hague (and its predecessors the Netherlands Institute for Spatial Research and the National Spatial Planning Agency) on issues relating to urban and regional economics with respect to planning and policy development. He is also the editor-in-chief and editor of the Journal of Economic & Social Geography (TESG), editor at the Cambridge Journal of Economy, Regions & Society. Until recently, he was editor of Regional Studies.

His research covers a wide range of specialisations within urban and regional economics: agglomeration benefits, evolutionary economic geography, housing market, knowledge production, economic networks, knowledge economy, district and community research, trade and FDI, urban networks, urban geography, European regional development, urban development in China, and spatial planning. He regularly publishes articles on these subjects in international journals and specialist literature. Van Oort combines more fundamental research with applied and policy-oriented research. For example, besides NWO and EU funded research, he also conducts research for Ministries, cities and regions.

In Rotterdam, Frank van Oort will continue his existing research lines and join the research and education programmes of IHS and Erasmus School of Economics. He will also become a research fellow at Tinbergen Institute.