Leonardo Nunes wins the Vrije Universiteit Master Thesis Award
What are the effects of the city wide parking prices increases that were implied in Amsterdam in April 2019? This is the main question that research master student Leonardo Nunes addresses in his master thesis on ’Parking policy: Evidence from Amsterdam’.
In order to answer this question, he used transaction data to investigate how these price increases affected parking demand, namely on how long people park, and on how many street parking transactions were avoided. He finds that parking price increases had a modest effect in decreasing parking duration, and a significant effect in decreasing the number of street parking transactions. For this thesis Leonardo received the 2020 Vrije Universiteit Master Thesis Award. The prize was awarded during the VU New Year’s Gala on January 28.
The jury is deeply impressed of this thesis and the huge amount of data points (more than 30 million!) Leonardo used to conduct his research. The statistical analyzes were very well structured and they consider the thesis of such high quality that it is publication worthy in this way. The jury also thought he made a tremendous job by linking this topical theme to very topical data.
Leonardo earned his master's degree in Spatial, Transport, Regional and Environmental Economics at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam in the summer of 2020. His thesis supervisors were Jos van Ommeren and Francis Ostermeijer. Currently he is a first year research master student in the Economics program of Tinbergen Institute.
If you are interested in reading the thesis, please send an email. View Leonardo's personal profile here.