Economics
Programmes Available for Supervision:
- PhD
Research Interests:
I am an applied labour economist - which means that I'm interested in many questions, as long as it involves individual-level data, that can be analysed in a way to estimate a causal effect of a policy on people's behaviour. I rely on large administrative datasets, surveys or experimental data for these projects. The data is often from the UK, but I also use evidence from Germany, Danemark or Kurdistan, and are either contemporary or historical; i.e. as long as their is good data and an interesting question, I'm interested in a project.
A large part of my research relates to:
- the economics of education, where I investigate among others incentive to study, peers or tuition fee. For example, I found that "Non-native speaker’s performance benefits from greater linguistic diversity. Native speakers are unaffected by classroom composition. Survey information points to changed interaction pat- terns in the classroom as a likely mechanism. While ethno-linguistic seminar composition has no meaningful impact on subsequent course choice, the effect of initial diversity on grades persists until the final year of study. The results imply that avoiding segregation along language lines is key in providing education for an international student body."
I also have some work on:
- The economics of crime (yes, criminals are rationals and their decisions can be analysed with economic models): For example, since South Asian households store gold jewelry at home, we find that burglaries in South Asian neighborhoods are more sensitive to variations in the gold price than other neighborhoods in the same municipality.
- Fertility decisions and how they are affected by the economic environment. For example, after the fall of the Berlin Wall, East Germany experienced an unprecedented temporary drop in fertility driven by economic uncertainty. We show that the children born during this transition period performed worse on a range of educational outcomes from an early age onward. The mothers of these children exhibit personal characteristics and family structures consistent with negative parental selection. Investigating the underlying mechanisms reveals that parental educational input and emotional attachment were also lower for these children. Finally, our ability to compare siblings means that we can reject that our results stem from a time of birth effect.
- Migration and discrimination. After World War II, eight million expelled Germans arrived in West Germany within 5 years. Our results show that cities with high inflows of forced migrants increased spending on welfare and education, decreased spending on infrastructure, raised local taxes, and incurred more debt. Part of these effects can be attributed to shifts in political preferences. The migrants held voting rights upon arrival and supported parties that explicitly catered to their interests and needs.
Key Words:
Labour, Crime, Education, Economics
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