Welcome to my website! I currently hold a position as an associate professor in Finance and Real Estate at Maastricht University, the Netherlands. I spent the last two years as a visiting scholar at the Haas School of Business, UC Berkeley, and I still spend quite some time at Berkeley, as Affiliated Faculty and Visiting Scholar at the Berkeley Program on Housing and Urban Policy. I recently received a prestigious three-year grant from the Dutch Organization for Scientific Research (NWO) for my work on energy efficiency and sustainability in the real estate sector. I also received awards from the United Nations Principles for Responsible Investment, Investment & Pensions Europe, the European Social Investment Forum, and the Aareal Bank/European Business School for this research.
My current research focus is on energy efficiency and "sustainability" in the real estate sector, concentrating on the microeconomics of energy efficiency in buildings – residential as well as commercial. My broader research interest ranges from urban economics to real estate investments, including topics such as land prices and regulation, transparency of global property markets, international property investments, and demographics.
A snapshot of my work (from a recent presentation at the Regenerative Network, Berkeley):
RegenTalk: The Economics of Green Building – Nils Kok from RegenNet on Vimeo.
This one is quite funny:
Besides scientific work at Maastricht University, where I also taught courses in Corporate Finance and Real Estate Finance, I work with large institutional property investors, such as APG and PGGM, and policy makers, such as the European Property Federation and Agentschap NL, on the implementation of my research into practice. I co-founded the Global Real Estate Sustainability Benchmark (www.gresb.com), an invester-led initiative backed by more than 40 institutional real estate investors, assessing the environmental performance of listed and private property funds around the world. (See the latest report “GRESB Research Report 2012”).
More about GRESB:
I’m also an executive teacher at the Luxembourg School of Finance, the Amsterdam Institute of Finance, and the Amsterdam School of Real Estate. I’m a contributing member of various real estate and market networks, such as the American Real Estate and Urban Economics Association and the American Economic Association, where I regularly present my work.
I communicate my ideas and findings in the international arena as a frequent speaker on academic and industry conferences, and I actively share my expertise through workshops with investment practitioners and policy makers. Presentations at recent meetings include: United Nations PRI Annual Meetings, MIPIM, ULI meetings; workshops for Grosvenor, Caisse des Dépôts, MISTRA Investments, and APG Investments; the NBER Summer Institute, AREUEA, ERES, ARES and EFM conferences; and seminars at the Harvard Business School, Yale, USC, UC Berkeley, Ecole Polytechnique, City University, and Cambridge University. My research has appeared in leading academic journals such as the American Economic Review, The Review of Economics and Statistics, The Journal of Environmental Economics and Management, Real Estate Economics and the Journal of Real Estate Finance and Economics. You can also find my research in newspapers, such as the Australian Financial Review, Das Handelsblatt, Le Monde and Het Financieele Dagblad, and in industry publications, such as Europe Real Estate and Vastgoedmarkt.
To conclude, something more Dutch:
