PhD position Economic Flood Damage Modeling f/m

The applicant will be based in the Department of Environmental Economics at the Institute for Environmental Studies (IVM) and TNO Innovation & Environment, Delft. The Department of Environmental Economics hosts an international research group of about 25 researchers, faculty members and PhD students. The department has a leading role in the economic assessment of environmental change, in particular economic resource modeling, economic valuation of ecosystem services and market based instruments. The group works on a variety of research topics, including adaptation to climate change, renewable energy, behavioral choice experiments, biodiversity conservation, risk and uncertainty, water pricing, mapping and modeling of ecosystem services, environmental management and poverty alleviation. The group aims at publishing high-quality interdisciplinary research in peer-reviewed journals and works together with the other departments in IVM on ecology and governance

Tasks

How do flood risks impact behavior of firms and households and regional economic development? Indirect effects are expected to be substantial and include long-term damage to firm supply chains, migration of households and firms, real estate prices and labour markets. Computable General Equilibrium (CGE) models are one way to capture the effects of business interruption. However, the equilibrium approach typically employed in CGE-models is in need of further investigation to handle the uncertainty, disruption and discontinuities related to flood events. Impacts on real estate values, changing behavior of investors and public recovery plans may structurally impact sectoral and regional development paths.

Central research questions of the PhD study are:

·         What are the impacts of a flood event and flood risk on adaptive behavior of firms and households?

·         How do regions recover from flood events?

Job summary

Return to results