Urban Economics (MSc) — module on developing-country cities
Erasmus School of Economics, 2025 · Lecturer · module designed and taught end to end
In Urban Economics, a foundational course in the MSc programme in Urban, Port and Transport Economics, students first learn the standard theories of the monocentric city,
housing, congestion, agglomeration, and transport, largely in settings with formal labor markets and
effective taxation. I designed and taught the closing module on developing-country cities: the lecture,
an R-based problem set, the seminar, and the assessment. The module introduces the empirical setting of
developing-country cities, including urbanization without industrialization, widespread informality, and
high density without commensurate infrastructure, and asks which of the earlier predictions survive in
this context.
The problem set is built around a stylized Lagos in which households with different incomes commute
through one another's neighborhoods to a central business district. Students solve a simple
general-equilibrium model by hand and in R, varying tax coverage, congestion costs, and the planner's
objective, and discover that the same economy can recommend extending a bus corridor under one objective
and reject it under another. The goal is that students learn which institutional feature changes the
result, separating a model's general mechanism from its context-specific implications for commuters,
landowners, and government.
Firm Location Choice and Productivity in Cities (BSc seminar)
Erasmus School of Economics, 2022–2025 · Lecturer · four cohorts of 100–120 students
This seminar in the BSc Strategy Economics program introduces a margin that strategy students often
overlook: where a firm locates can shape its productivity and survival. Weekly topics cover market
access, transport and trade networks, agglomeration and knowledge spillovers, congestion and rents,
entrepreneurial networks, the sorting of heterogeneous firms into cities, and place-based policy. The
readings range from the division of Germany to advertising agencies on Madison Avenue to Danish
entrepreneurs, and return to the same lesson: the importance of location varies across industries,
stages of development, firms, and managers.
Students write literature surveys, take short quizzes on the mechanics of each week's paper, and
apply the evidence to business cases, for instance advising the CEO of a struggling engineering firm
on whether to relocate fully, partially, or not at all. Writing a recommendation forces students to
identify which mechanisms apply, commit to a claim, and defend it with evidence rather than summarize
the literature. Across four cohorts, this format has produced sharper and more economically reasoned
reports than the open-ended essays it replaced.