OSSOKINA

Highlighted publications

Do you listen to your neighbour? The role of block leaders in community-led energy retrofits (2024)

Tije van Casteren, Ioulia Ossokina, Theo Arentze, Energy research and social science 103472.

Community-led initiatives can play an important role in reducing the barriers to the adoption of energy-saving measures in homes. Quantitative insights about the role of communities and their leaders in energy transition are largely missing however. This paper exploits unique data on 78 community-led retrofitting campaigns run during 2014-2020 in the Netherlands, and studies econometrically the role of block leaders - the residents who managed the communities. Special focus lies on the analysis of the peer externalities that block leaders exerted on other community members. Contrary to much of the literature, peer externalities here are not driven by visibility and imitation, but by offering access to information and by cheap talk. The results show evidence of a spatial distance decay in peer effects, with the largest effect within 200 m of a block leader. Our insights suggest that communities should optimally spread out leaders geographically and select leaders whose dwellings are representative of the community existing building stock.

Do highway widenings reduce congestion? (2023)

Ioulia Ossokina, Jos van Ommeren and Henk van Mourik, Journal of Economic Geography 23: 871-900

Highway construction occurs nowadays mainly through widening of existing roads rather than building new roads. This article documents that highway widenings considerably reduce congestion in the short run, defined here as 6 years. Using longitudinal microdata from highway detector loops in the Netherlands, we find substantial travel time savings. These savings occur despite strong increases in traffic flow. The welfare benefits in the short run already cover 40% of the widenings investment costs. Our article contributes to an explanation why countries invest in roadworks even when the fundamental law of congestion predicts that travel savings disappear in the long run.

Comparing self-navigation and video mode in a choice experiment to measure public space preferences (2022)

Yuwen Zhao, Pauline van den Berg, Ioulia Ossokina and Theo Arentze, Computers, Environment and Urban Systems 95: 101828

3D dynamic visualization of urban design is useful to study people's valuations of public space attributes. We compare valuations derived from an experiment with a video and one with a self-navigation game visualization. Both lead to similar results. The choice of visualization mode can thus be based on other (secondary) considerations such as required sample size, respondents' experiences with navigation interfaces, and the costs and effort needed to build visualization.

Reference-dependent housing choice behaviour: Why are elderly reluctant to move? (2022)

Ioulia Ossokina & Theo Arentze, Housing studies DOI: 10.1080/02673037.2022.2151984, 19p.

Does information encourage or discourage tenants to accept energy retrofitting of homes? (2021)

Ioulia Ossokina, Stephan Kerperien and Theo Arentze, Energy Economics 103: 105534

We study whether providing information about the consequences of residential energy retrofitting encourages public housing tenants to agree with retrofitting. We find that: (i) tenants require a return of 30% on energy retrofitting of their dwellings; (ii) information on comfort-related consequences of renovations increases support; (iii) Information on financial consequences reduces the support.

Best living concepts for the elderly: a stated choice experiment and architectural design (2020)

Ioulia Ossokina, Theo Arentze, Dick van Gameren & Dirk van den Heuvel, Journal of Housing and the Built Environment 35: 847-865

We combine the insights from social sciences and architecture to design best living concepts for elderly homeowners. We perform a stated choice experiment and derive the willingness-to-pay for different residential attributes. We show how these attributes can be traded off against each other in architectural design to create best living concepts.

Spatial and welfare effects of automated driving: will cities grow, decline or both? (2019)

George Gelauff, Ioulia Ossokina, Coen Teulings, Transportation Research Part A Policy and Practice: 121: 277-294

In a general equilibrium model, we show that automated driving can lead both, to growth and decline of cities. More productive time use during car trips leads to suburbanization. Fast and comfortable door-to-door automated public transit attracts people to cities. A combination of the two results in population clustering in the largest, most attractive cities, at the expense of smaller cities and non-urban regions.

Land use, worker heterogeneity and welfare benefits of public goods (2018)

Coen Teulings, Ioulia Ossokina & Henri de Groot, Journal of Urban Economics 103: 67-82

We construct a spatial general equilibrium model, in which investments in public goods lead to population changes in their vicinity. The effect is twofold: (i) population density increases; (ii) share of population groups who value these public goods increases. The model is estimated on Dutch data and applied to study the welfare gains from a large railway investment. Welfare gains are largest for highly educated. Welfare gains from population relocation account for up to 30% of the total benefits.

Urban traffic externalities (2015)

Ioulia Ossokina and Gerard Verweij. Regional science and urban economics, 55, 1-13.

We show that the new bypass N14 near The Hague led to environmental benefits by reducing traffic nuisance on local streets. We combine a quasi-experiment and a fixed effect hedonic price model. We find that a 50% lower traffic density induced some 3000 euro welfare gain per household. Residents did not foresee this change in advance however.

Working papers

Energy-efficient homes: effects on poverty, environment, comfort (2023)

Vincent Roberdel, Ioulia Ossokina, Vladimir Karamychev, Theo Arentze, Tinbergen Institute discussion paper TI 2023-082/V.

Energy efficiency improvements in low income housing are increasingly used as a policy instrument to alleviate poverty. Our paper shows that this may come at the expense of reduced environmental benefits. We follow 125,000 Dutch low-income households during eight years and exploit a quasi-experimental policy that diminished the heat losses in their homes. We pay specific attention to the policy effects at the very left tail of the income distribution. While the average after-policy reduction in natural gas consumption for heating amounts to 22%, the poorest only save 16%. We build and calibrate a microeconomic model explaining this pattern from substitution between thermal comfort and other goods, and use it to compute welfare trade-offs of the policies.

The urban economics of retail (2022)

Ioulia Ossokina, Jan Svitak, Coen Teulings, Revise & Resubmit.

Using property-level data from 327 larger shopping areas in the Netherlands, we show that the spatial structure of a shopping area resembles a monocentric city in miniature. Just like a monocentric city, a shopping area has a pronounced center where the rents are the highest and the vacancy the lowest, and a negative retail rent gradient from this center to the edges. The average retail rent gradient is 20% per 100 meter distance, and the vacancy odds are twice as high at the edge as in the center. In a simple model of land market competition, we illustrate how the negative retail rent gradient helps tackle the adverse consequences of structural drops in retail demand.

Do modern cities encourage or discourage walking of health-impaired seniors? (2022)

Ioulia Ossokina, Pleun van Wijk, Birgit Jurgenhake, Theo Arentze, working paper.

Physical activity outdoors is essential for healthy aging (UN, 2020). In this paper we exploit a stated choice experiment with visualizations to study which characteristics of urban sidewalks are most influential in stimulating walking outdoors at older age for people facing mobility impairments.