Daniel Hörcher

Short Bio

Daniel Hörcher is a transport scientist and urban economist, and a senior research associate within CIAS (Corvinus Institute for Advanced Studies) at Corvinus University of Budapest. Daniel is honorary research associate at the Transport Strategy Centre, Imperial College London, where he is assistant supervisor of PhD candidates Tobie Cusson, Surabhi Ojha and Javad Eshtiyagh. He is also a part-time research associate at the Department of Transport Technology and Economics at Budapest University of Technology and Economics.

His research interests are centred around three themes.

1. Transport service provision in spatial general equilibrium. Understanding and quantifying wider economic impacts beyond traditional transport appraisal. Optimal transport provision under agglomeration economies and dynamic urban spatial structure. Transport appraisal in quantitative spatial models.

2. The economics of public transport supply. Microeconomic models of tariff structures and capacity provision, and optimisation; societal objectives with financial, equity-oriented, political constraints, and competition between governments. Understanding and quantifying the external social cost of public transport use in crowding. 

3. Statistical analysis of large-scale automated transport data. Revealed preference discrete choice models for the estimation of transport user preferences. Causal inference methods for ex-post evaluation of interventions in the multimodal transport system.

Daniel is author of 26 peer-reviewed articles published in leading journals of transport research, spatial economics, and statistics.

He is Editor of the Handbook on Transport Pricing and Financing (Edward Elgar Publishing), a collection of 25 chapters on transport economics published in May 2023 with co-editors Alejandro Tirachini and Erik Verhoef.

He serves as Associate Editor of the Journal of Transport Economics and Policy (JTEP). Since 2022, Daniel has been member of the Executive and Scientific Committees of the International Transportation Economics Association.

In recent years Daniel Hörcher provided advice on transport policy (transport appraisal and fares policy) for public institutions in the UK, Australia and Hungary, and contributed to policy papers commissioned by the International Transport Forum at the OECD, and the International Growth Centre.

Background

Daniel graduated from the Budapest University of Technology and Economics (BSc in Transport Engineering, supervisor: Professor Katalin Tánczos) and VU University Amsterdam (MSc in Spatial, Transport and Environmental Economics, supervisor: Professor Piet Rietveld). He joined Imperial College in August 2014 as a PhD candidate supervised by Professor Dan Graham and sponsored by the TSC, and successfully defended his doctoral dissertation in October 2017. Daniel has been postdoctoral research associate at Imperial between 2018 and 2025.