The conflicting geographies of social frontiers: Exploring the asymmetric impacts of social frontiers on household mobility in Rotterdam

Social frontiers arise when there are sharp differences in the demographic composition of adjacent communities. This paper provides the first quantitative study of their impact on household mobility. We hypothesise that conflicting forces of white flight and territorial allegiance lead to asymmetrical effects, impacting residents on one side of...

From Homes to Assets and From Pioneers to Shareholders: An Evolving Frontier Terminology

Frontier settlements played a key role in the formation of Israeli society and its territorial project. In the pre-statehood years and during the first decades after the establishment of the state of Israel, settling the frontiers formed one of the main national objectives, securing the nation’s control over space while promoting a unified local...

The Community Settlement: a neo-rural territorial tool

The Israeli Community Settlements are small-scale non-agricultural villages that consist of a limited number of families and a homogenous character. This method began to be used by the Israeli government and its different planning agencies during the 1970s as a tool to strengthen the state's territorial and demographical control over the Israeli...

Passenger-centric timetable rescheduling: A user equilibrium approach

Unexpected disruptions commonly occur in the railway network, causing delays, and extra cost for operators and inconvenience for passengers by missing their connection and facing overcrowded trains. This paper presents a passenger-centric approach for timetable rescheduling in case of disruption. We study a railway system in which passengers...

The Privatisation of a National Project: The settlements along the trans-Israel Highway since 1977

The settlements along the Trans-Israel Highway illustrate the privatisation of the national settlement enterprise. To understand this process, this dissertation focuses on the settlement production mechanism, which consists of the reciprocal interests of the government and various private groups to develop and domesticate the border area between...

Pantai Project: The Trade-Offs Between Plastic Pollution and the Cost of the Waste Management System for a Household; a Case Study in the Watershed of the Petanu River, Bali

It has been determined that the plastic waste load in the Petanu river (Bali, Indonesia) can be as high as 2015.5 kg/day in the beginning of the rainy season. To restore the ecosystem and protect human livelihood this load should be reduced drastically. The enormous pollution rate is largely due to the massive amounts of mismanaged (plastic)...

Bayesian mean–variance analysis: optimal portfolio selection under parameter uncertainty

The paper solves the problem of optimal portfolio choice when the parameters of the asset returns distribution, for example the mean vector and the covariance matrix, are unknown and have to be estimated by using historical data on asset returns. Our new approach employs the Bayesian posterior predictive distribution which is the distribution...

The use of the scaling property in a frontier analysis of a system of equations: An application to Dutch secondary education

This article presents a one-stage efficiency frontier analysis based on the scaling property. This type of analysis is a not very often applied in empirical work in spite of its nice features. Due to the scaling property the influence of exogenous (managerial) variables on efficiency can be modelled and estimated in one stage. It also opens...

Financialising the Frontier: Harish City

Housing and settlement played a key role in the formation of an Israeli society and its territorial project. While earlier frontier settlement relied on the rural sector and on peripheral development towns, with the liberalisation and privatisation of the local economy it was incorporated in the nationwide suburbanisation process. Eventually,...

Measuring the performance of local administrative public services

The academic literature provides excellent methodologies to identify best practices and to calculate inefficiencies by stochastic frontier analysis. However, these methodologies are regarded as a black box by policy makers and managers and therefore results are hard to accept. This paper proposes an alternative class of stochastic frontier...

Water efficient sterilization for humanitarian aid: A redesign of the Robustex 90L (autoclave)

This master thesis describes a graduation project that is elaborated for Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) innovation project Sweden. MSF is an independent, international, medical humanitarian organization. The organization is specialized in providing humanitarian aid in (developing) countries. The goal of this project is to find a solution for the...

Iteratively Weighted Least Squares in Stochastic Frontier Estimation: Applied to the Dutch Hospital Industry

This paper proposes an alternative class of stochastic frontier estimators. Instead of making distributional assumptions about the error and efficiency component in the econometric specification of a cost function model (or any other model), this class is based on the idea that some observations contain more information about the true frontier...

Economies of scale and scope in mental health care

Economies of scale and scope are usually derived under the assumption that the set of production possibilities are shared by all firms in an industry irrespective of whether they specialize in a single output or not. Mental health care institutions in the Netherlands vary substantially in the scale and the number of outputs. Estimation of one...

Multi-objective optimization in the construction industry

Multi-objective-optimization-based positioning of houses in a residential neighborhood is described. The task is the placement of the buildings in a favorable configuration constrained by two objectives, which are garden performance and visual privacy performance requirements. The method used is evolutionary computation with the Pareto front...