On the road to recovery?

Posted by Dr Rosa Sanchis-Guarner, SERC This morning the Government unveiled "the biggest road-building programme in 40 years", as part of a package of infrastructure schemes intended to drive the UK’s long-term economic development. Road-building is often opposed on environmental grounds, and those costs are clear. But does it produce any economic gains? Surprisingly, we have very little robust evidence - until now

Facebook or Wikipedia? ICT and education: evidence from student home addresses

Dr Rosa Sanchis-Guarner, BA Postdoctoral Fellow at the IC Business School and CEP Research Associate The Government is currently investing over £1 billion to provide superfast broadband to 95% of the UK by 2017. Both the European Union and the US have similarly ambitious plans to increase access to broadband services providing download speeds of 30Mbps or above. These investments are justified as having positive impacts on individuals and businesses, ranging from higher productivity to more flexible working schedules

First-come first-served: identifying the demand effect of immigration inflows on house prices

An inflow of immigrants into a region affects house prices in three ways. In the short run, housing demand increases due to the increase in foreign-born population. In the long run, immigrants affect native location decisions and housing supply conditions. Previous research on the effect of immigration on local house prices has argued that the impact of immigrant demand cannot be separated from the demand changes due to native relocation or that the impact of immigrants on native mobility has no consequences on the estimates. In this paper I propose a methodology to pin down the immigrant demand effect. I apply it to Spanish data during the period 2002-2010 and I show that overlooking the impact of immigration on native mobility induces a sizeable bias in the short-run estimates. My results are robust to controlling for changes in housing supply

Study of the active flow control on a multi-element high-lift airfoil

This thesis provides an study of the flow around a McDonnell Douglas 30P30N with an Active Flow Control device, a synthetic jet, with different configurations. The flow is two dimensional, with a Reynolds number of 1.7·10⁶ , an Angle of Attack of 5.5⁰ and a Mach of 0.7. The purpose of this device is to reduce the drag and increases the lift by reducing the vortex shedding at the wake by retarding the boundary layer detachment. Several Reynold Averaged Navier-Stokes simulations have been performed to determine the configuration where the maximum aerodynamic efficiency is reach. It has been concluded that the actuation is highly dependant on the position of the actuator; placed after the suction region has been two time more efficient than placed on it. In addition to this, it has been observed that the efficiency increased with the momentum coefficient, the nondimensional frequency and the angle of the exhaust velocity. All of them have played a major role on the actuation