2026–27 Economics Job Market Candidate
PhD Candidate in Economics, TU Dresden
Researcher at Thuenen Institute and Humboldt Berlin
Expected PhD: March 2027
Labor Economics · Public Economics · Urban Economics · Political Economy
In my dissertation, I study how place-based policies and public-sector activity shape local labor markets, spatial equilibrium, and political behavior.
Beyond my dissertation, I also study zoning and housing affordability and questions of tax incidence and pass-through. My methodological interests include causal inference, quantitative spatial models, and Bayesian machine learning.
References: Alexander Kemnitz (TU Dresden) · Gabriel Ahlfeldt (Humboldt) · Jan Bakker (Bocconi) · Jordi Jofre Monseny (IEB Barcelona)
Job Market Paper
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Society of Labor Economists Poster Prize at the 6th World Labor Conference in Toronto
Evaluates a large Bavarian public-agency relocation program from metropolitan to rural areas in Germany using linked administrative employer–employee data to estimate effects on private sector employment in both areas receiving and losing public jobs, and quantifying the welfare effects of the policy in a quantitative spatial equilibrium model.
Book chapter · 2026
Reviews international evidence on capital-city relocations and public-agency decentralization. Moving government jobs can generate employment and population gains in receiving places, with effects shaped by the scale, skill mix, and permanence of the relocation; the chapter also examines consequences for the regions that lose public employment.
Work in progress
Combines matched employer–employee data with an original postcode-level zoning dataset covering all of Germany to discipline a spatial general-equilibrium model of how land-use regulation trades off housing affordability against agglomeration, productivity, welfare, and inequality.
Policy paper
Uses Germany’s 2022 temporary fuel-tax cut and comparable European reforms to estimate pass-through at the pump, showing that tax relief reached consumers but with heterogeneous dynamics across countries and over time.
Coverage: German Federal Antitrust Agency (Bundeskartellamt) · Monopolies Commission of the German Bundestag · DNN
Working paper
Exploits quasi-experimental variation from Bavaria’s rule-based public-agency relocations to estimate whether place-based economic policy changes voting behavior, providing evidence that targeted regional policy can translate into electoral responses.
Working paper
Rather than testing one favored explanation, compares more than 26 economic, cultural, and institutional drivers across more than 30 Western democracies using Bayesian Model Averaging and Bayesian Additive Regression Trees to identify robust and nonlinear relationships.
Working paper
Reassesses the estimated long-run trade effects of the 1866 banking crisis through replication and modern robustness checks, identifying implementation issues while showing that the central result survives.