Gerard van der Meijden (1984) is Associate Professor of Environmental and Natural Resource Economics at the Department of Spatial Economics at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. He obtained his Research Master's degree (cum laude) in Economics with a specialization in Dynamic Macroeconomics from Tilburg University in 2009. He holds a PhD from Tilburg University.
The transition to a climate-neutral economy depends not only on technological innovation, but also on the availability of the natural resources needed to produce and store clean energy. In his resesarch, Gerard van der Meijden examines how resource scarcity, market power, strategic interaction, and innovation affect the energy transition. He studies how firms, governments, and consumers respond to changing technologies and policies, and how these responses affect sustainability, economic growth, and resource use.
A first research strand focuses on critical minerals. Critical minerals such as lithium, cobalt, nickel, and rare earth elements play a central role in batteries, renewable energy technologies, and electrification. His work analyzes how mining, recycling, international trade, and strategic government policies determine the availability of these resources and influence the speed and cost of the energy transition. Particular attention is given to market concentration and the role of recycling in reducing resource dependence.
His second line of research examines strategic interaction and market power in resource and energy markets. He studies how the behaviour of large resource owners and energy producers affects resource extraction, energy prices, climate outcomes, and the effectiveness of climate policies. This includes research on fossil-fuel markets, oligopolistic competition, cartel behaviour, and the interaction between climate policies and strategic resource extraction.
Finally, Gerard van der Meijden's research is directed at technological change, the energy transition, and the macroeconomy. His work investigates how innovation influences the feasibility and speed of decarbonization. Recent work develops the concept of fossil-eliminating technical change, which studies how breakthrough technologies can unlock decarbonization in hard-to-abate sectors and how expectations, innovation incentives, and public policy interact to either reinforce fossil dependence or accelerate the transition towards clean energy systems.
Gerard van der Meijden teaches at Bachelor's, Master's, and Research Master's (MPhil) levels within different economics programmes. His teaching focuses on helping students develop a rigorous understanding of economic theory while connecting analytical insights to contemporary societal challenges such as climate change, technical progress, and resource scarcity. He supervises BSc and MSc theses and has delivered Summer Schools at the Tinbergen Institute and Intensive Courses at the University of Indonesia. He holds a Basic Teaching Qualification (Basiskwalificatie Onderwijs, BKO) and is obtaining a Senior Teaching Qualification (Seniorkwalificatie Onderwijs, SKO). He is co-author of a textbook about Climate Economics for advanced undergraduate, post-graduate, and doctoral students.
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