3 January 2023 - A number of Dutch municipalities target specific neighbourhoods for surveillance, which may include house searches. An analysis shows that targeted municipalities tend to be among the poorest neighbourhoods in the municipality they were selected from, and among the neighbourhoods with the highest share of people with a non-western background.

16 February 2022 - Hourly weather data is available from observations, but also from models that estimate local weather conditions - a bit like weather forecasts for the past. In this article, I compare estimates from Oikolab and ERA5 to observations from the Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute (KNMI), for three locations in the Netherlands.

30 December 2020 - Every year when it’s time for New Year’s resolutions, there’s a spike in google searches for ‘quit smoking’, but an even bigger spike in searches for ‘delete facebook’. An update.

2 October 2020 - The Dutch government plans to change the way in which representatives, including Members of Parliament, are elected. The number of votes candidates get will play a larger role in deciding who gets elected. I’ll explore how this might impact candidates by gender, incumbency, and where they live.

23 August 2020 - The corona crisis has boosted interest in so-called nowcasting. As society changes in unforeseen ways, economists don’t want to wait for the publication of official statistics and look for data sources that provide earlier clues about the state of the economy. A new example of such data is the location data provided in Google’s mobility reports. This data reflects activity levels at locations like shops, supermarkets and workplaces.