Two Urban Economic Short Courses coming soon

Feb 23, 2024

Motu Research is excited to announce that Senior Fellow Stuart Donovan is coordinating three-day urban economics short courses in both Wellington (25-27 June) and Auckland (7-9 October). 

These fun and intensive courses are designed for people with a variety of academic and professional backgrounds; no formal economic training is required. 

Over the three days of the course, participants will be introduced to key urban economic concepts, relevant research, and implications for policy. The three days of the course will cover: 

• Day 1: The monocentric city model, agglomeration economies, and transport economics 
• Day 2: The Rosen-Roback Model, heterogeneity and sorting, and infrastructure policy  
• Day 3: Housing markets, models, and place-based economic policy 

Stuart will lead the first two days of the the course, drawing on his experience working as both a researcher and a consultant in New Zealand, Australia, and the Netherlands. Stuart has run similar urban economics courses in many cities over the past five years. The third day of the course will be delivered with recognised local experts, namely Dr Kirdan Lees from Sense Partners in Wellington and Dr Shane Martin from MRCagney in Auckland. 

“Even though New Zealand is already a highly urbanised country, the share of people that live and work in our cities and towns is projected to continue to grow,” says Stuart. “Trends like this, which are common globally, motivated me to develop and deliver this urban economics short course, where we can discuss some of the forces that have helped shape our cities and towns before now and how these forces might change in the future.” 

For further information, please refer to the flyers for Wellington and Auckland, respectively. Both of these flyers contain a link to registration pages with information on pricing.