2026–27 Economics Job Market Candidate
PhD Candidate in Economics, TU Dresden
Researcher at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin and the Thünen Institute
Expected PhD: 2027
Urban & Spatial Economics · Labor Economics · Public 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: Gabriel Ahlfeldt (Humboldt, LSE) · Alexander Kemnitz (TU Dresden) · Jan Bakker (Bocconi) · Kamila Cygan-Rehm (TU Dresden) · Jordi Jofre Monseny (IEB Barcelona)
Job Market Paper
New draft available soon!
SOLE Poster Prize · 6th World Labor Conference, Toronto
Exploits a large Bavarian public-agency relocation program and linked administrative employer–employee data to estimate effects at both receiving and sending locations, then quantifies how public employment contributes to private agglomeration economies in a spatial-equilibrium model.
Book chapter · Forthcoming
Synthesizes international evidence on capital relocations and public-agency decentralization to assess when moving government jobs can work as place-based policy—and whether the places losing them bear meaningful costs.
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: DNN · Bundeskartellamt · German Bundestag
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.