Master Class Research Fundamentals

With this course, we want participants to acquire the necessary skills for setting up and successfully implementing research projects, for selecting the appropriate research methods and for critically assessing research by others. It deals with both quantitative and qualitative research methods applied across the field of transport economics. We want participants to get familiar with key research choices, the full research process, the relationship between theory, research and application, and the development of own research tools and techniques.

We provide a structured analytical framework to support development of research studies that can be a valuable tool as well for consulting studies and, in general, any problem-solving situation.

The object of analysis in this course is the strategic interaction between firms on markets and the implications for consumer welfare and firm profits. Central concepts are market power and market structure and how these are affected by exogenous changes in demand, technology, and institutional constraints. The course focuses on the analysis and evaluation of policy intervention using comparative statics analysis, regression analysis, and program evaluation methods.

The purpose of this module is to provide a thorough yet practical overview of important concepts and methods in welfare economics, with special emphasis on cost-benefit analysis. After a brief introduction, we focus on how to measure welfare changes on individuals and how to aggregate such individual changes at the national or regional level. We go on to consider the implications of recent developments on investment in networks and on reference-dependent preferences. A large part of the course is then devoted to the study of specific applications of welfare economics to the transport sector. This includes the relation between externalities, pricing, and investment, evaluating energy policies in the transport sector, transport policies with multiple governments, examples of practical cost-benefit analyses, etc.

With this module on Transport Modelling, we want you to get familiar with a number of modelling and forecasting techniques that are key to research in transport economics. We thereby offer you a unique combination of transport economic modelling techniques and engineering techniques, thus fusing the perspectives of the software engineer and the transport economist. After all, transport economists understand the problem they want to study and have an idea about what they need from models, but they are not always up-to-date with the possibilities in other fields such as engineering, and vice versa. This module is thus of interest to both (professional) transport economists who want to learn more about engineering types of modelling and to (professional) engineers who want to improve their understanding of economic types of modelling.

After this course, you will (have/be able to):

• differentiate between the different fundamental research methods and understand their strengths and weaknesses when applied to real-world problems;
• you will be familiar with system thinking framework, process and compositional approaches for research design, including identification of research questions and formulation of hypothesis;
• use multimethodologies to approach complex problems with quantitative and qualitative methods;
• a thorough understanding of the basic microeconomic components of structural industrial organization models (IO), i.e. consumer behavior (demand), firm behavior (costs), and competition between firms;
• interpret and criticize the assumptions and results of quantitative studies published in IO field journals, working papers, and consulting reports;
• execute simple but rigorous regression analysis studies of demand, costs, market power and program evaluation;
• theoretically and empirically investigate market outcomes and assess the welfare effects of horizontal and vertical integration;
• analyze government policies in the transport sector using the tools of modern welfare economics: social welfare functions, cost-benefit analysis, methods to evaluate welfare reform, etc.;
• understand and critically evaluate existing studies;
• perform evaluation studies independently based on available information, and to communicate the results to policy makers;
• familiar with a number of modelling and forecasting techniques that are key to research in transport economics;
• match the perspectives of the software engineer and the transport economist. Transport economists understand the problem they want to study and have an idea about what they need from models, but they are not always up-to-date with the possibilities in other fields such as engineering, and vice versa.