Mathieu Steijn

I am a (jr.) Assistant Professor in Urban Economics/Economic Geography at Utrecht University and am also affiliated with the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. Like most urban economists, I'm fascinated by the unequal distribution of human activity across space. Maps like the ones available under the tab 'Data Visualisations' reflect the location choice of millions of people for their homes, jobs, businesses, and research. These maps show a 'spiky' world and inspire questions on how the spatial distribution of different human activities came to being, depend on each other, and will evolve in the future.

Within this vast domain of spatial economics and economic geography, my research focusses on documenting trends of agglomeration and understanding its causes and consequences. In particular the consequences for the distribution of welfare, both within as between regions. To this goal, I build on labour economics, innovation studies, and public economics next to agglomeration theories.

In another strain of research, I look into how regions move into different activities and policies that can alter their development paths. Furthermore, I also take an interest in consumer city like topics. I scraped metadata of photos on Flickr to aid in understanding the attractiveness of regions. This data is available under 'Data & Code', where you will also find other datasets and useful R code. On this website I also share visualisations, and publications of my research.