The RTG brings together internationally visible professors from different sub-disciplines within economics (e.g. public economics, macroeconomics, labor economics, regional economics or health economics) who share a genuine interest in regional aspects of the economy and access to and expertise in handling highly relevant data sets. Together with about seven incoming doctoral students each year they form the RTG group.

Professors

Thomas Bauer is Professor of Economics at the Faculty of Management and Economics at the Ruhr-University Bochum (RUB). He earned his PhD at LMU Munich. After a one-year post-doc research visit at the Rutgers University, he joined the IZA in Bonn and received his habilitation from the University of Bonn. Since February 2004 he is member of the Executive Board of the RWI in Essen, since 2009 he is Vice-President. Since 2011 he is member of the Expert Council of German Foundations on Integration and Migration, since September 2016 he is the Chairman of the Council.

His research interests are economics of migration, labor and population economics, health economics and applied microeconometrics. His work comprises theoretical and empirical work. Research topics include, among others, the labor market integration of migrants, the effect of immigration on native workers, the determinants of migration as well as the evaluation of active and passive labor market policy.

Thushyanthan Baskaran is a Professor of Economics at the Ruhr University Bochum. His current research focuses on public economics, regional/urban economics and development economics, covering topics such as fiscal capacity, political budget cycles, political selection, and economic development. He has studied Economics at the Free University of Berlin and received his PhD in Economics from the University of Heidelberg in 2010. He was previously a Postdoctoral Researcher at the University of Gothenburg, an Assistant Professor for Public Finance at the University of Goettingen, and a Professor for Applied Microeconomics at the University of Siegen. He is also a research associate at the ZEW Mannheim and a CESifo Research Network Fellow. His work has been published in journals such as the Review of Economics and Statistics, American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, the Journal of Public Economics, and the Journal of Urban Economics.

Lukas Buchheim is Professor of Microeconomics at TU Dortmund, Germany, and research affiliate of CESifo. Before joining TU Dortmund, he was postdoctoral researcher at LMU Munich, where he also received his PhD (in 2013). During his time at LMU Munich, he was member of the SFB/CRC 15 “Governance and the Efficency of Economic Systems” (2008 -2010) and SFB/CRC “Rationality and Competition” (2017-2021), and a visiting postdoctoral fellow at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (2014-2015). In his research, Lukas Buchheim frequently works on topics on the boundary between Micro- and Macroeconomics. For example, he studied the dynamics of political transitions, estimated the regional economic dynamics of public policy from microeconomic data, and investigated how consumers and firms process information to form expectations. His work has been published in leading journals like the Review of Economic Studies, AEJ: Economic Policy, the Journal of Monetary Economics, and Management Science. Research interests Expectation Formation, Regional Economics, Political Economy

Christiane Hellmanzik is Professor of Urban, Regional and International Economics at the TU Dortmund University, Germany. She received her PhD from Trinity College Dublin, Ireland, her M.A. from University College Dublin, Ireland, and her B.Sc. in Economics from the University of Maastricht, the Netherlands, and has been a Postdoc at the Economics Department of Heidelberg before she was appointed Assistant Professor in the Department of Economics at the University of Hamburg, Germany. She is a labor and trade economist with a particular interest in creative production. Her research has covered a range of topics from agglomeration of economic activity to migration, peer effects, auctions and art markets, economic history as well as international trade of goods and services.

Most of her research employs large, novel datasets based on which certain aspects of creative production can be quantified and thereby understood better. Her most recent research projects concern the role of the internet for international trade in services as well as the production by historic writers. She will be on the Board of the Association of Cultural Economics from 2018 to 2020.

Read more: www.christianehellmanzik.com

Philip Jung is Professor of Economics at the TU Dortmund. He started his Ph.D. in Freiburg and the study center in Gerzensee (Switzerland), moved to Philadelphia at the Penn university (USA) and earned his PhD finally at Goethe university in Frankfurt under the supervision of Dirk Krueger. He has spent two post-doc years in Amsterdam with Wouter den Haan. He moved as a Junior-professor to Mannheim university and accepted afterwards an associate professorship (W2) at Bonn university. Finally, he has worked as full professor (W3) at TU Dortmund since 2014.

His research interests are macroeconomics and business cycle theory, labor economics, regional economics, economic history and computational economics. His work comprises theoretical and empirical work, with a clear emphasize on structural estimation. Research topics include the design of an optimal unemployment insurance system in heterogeneous regions, earnings losses after job losses, mismatch in regional and occupational skills, optimal governmental debt and default decisions and expectation formation during the great depression and the road to Hitler. His current research focuses on structural estimation of heterogeneous agent models with regional mismatch.

Martin Karlsson is Professor of Economics of the University of Duisburg-Essen since 2012. Before taking up his current position at the Chair of Health Economics in Essen, Martin has been working at the Technische Universität Darmstadt (2009-12), at the University of Oslo (2009-16) at the University of Oxford (2006-09) and at Cass Business School in London (2005-06). Martin received his doctoral degree from the European University Institute in 2007. Beside his work at the Chair of Health Economics, Martin is a Research Fellow of IZA, a Guest Professor at Lund University and Director of CINCH, a national centre for research on health economics. Martin regularly organises international academic conferences on different current topics within health economics, and he participates in various international research collaborations.

Martin’s research agenda spans a wide range of topics within health economics. His previous work has been devoted to economic aspects of long-term care, to the effect of sick pay on worker absenteeism, and to the relationship between economic inequality and health. In addition, his current work focuses on the analysis of information asymmetries in markets for private health insurance; ageing and long-term care; and the impact of labor market fluctuations on health. Martin has published in leading journals such as the Journal of the European Economic Association, Journal of Health Economics, The Economic Journal, the Journal of Public Economics, and the Journal of Applied Econometrics.

Sanne Kruse-Becher is a Juniorprofessor of Macroeconomics at Ruhr-Universität Bochum. She holds a Ph.D. degree in Economics from Aarhus University, Denmark. Before her Assistant Professorship, she was working as a Postdoc at Leuphana University Lüneburg and held a temporary professorship at Carl-von-Ossietzky University Oldenburg.

Her research interests are international trade, migration and applied microeconometrics. Her current research focuses on (i) local consequences of wars on labor market and health outcomes through global linkages, (ii) consequences and countermeasures in response to firms’ tax evasion through transfer pricing and (iii) firms’ inventory management.

https://www.wiwi.ruhr-uni-bochum.de/jpmakro/research/index.html.de

Marie Paul is Professor for Quantitative Methods in Economics at the Mercator School of Management (MSM) of the University of Duisburg-Essen. She earned her PhD at Mannheim University, visited the University of Wisconsin, and did a Post-Doc at the University of Freiburg before she started in 2011 as a Juniorprofessor in Duisburg.

Her research interests are in labor economics (active labor market policies, vouchers, family policies, and female labor market careers) and in applied microeconometrics (evaluation methods, Markov Chain Monte Carlo simulation, administrative data). She is currently a principal investigator in the DFG priority program 1764 “The German Labor Market in a Globalized World”.

Nadine Riedel is Professor for economic policy and regional economics at Westfälische-Wilhelms-Universität Münster. She studied Economics and German Language & Literature at the University of Regensburg and the Trinity College Dublin. In 2008, she received a Ph.D. in Economics from the University of Munich. Prior to joining the University of Bochum in 2014, she held teaching and research positions at the University of Oxford and the University of Munich. From 2010 to 2014, she was a Professor of Public Economics at the University of Hohenheim. Her current research interests comprise questions related to the impact of taxation and local public goods and service provision on firm behavior. Methodologically, her work draws on state-of-the-art micro-econometric estimation approaches. She is a member of the scientific advisory boards of the German Federal Ministry of Finance, the ZEW Mannheim, the RWI Essen and the IAW Tübingen.

Tobias Seidel is Professor of Economics at the Mercator School of Management (MSM) of the University of Duisburg-Essen. He earned his PhD at LMU Munich where he also spent one post-doc year. After his second post-doc year at the University of Colorado at Boulder, he moved to ETH Zurich before joining the MSM in 2012.

His research interests are international economics, regional economics, public economics, and development economics. His work comprises theoretical and empirical work, both reduced-form and structural. Research topics include labor market rigidities in the global economy, credit frictions, place-based policies and regional migration. His current research focuses on structural estimation of spatial models. He is a member of the CESifo Research Network and CRED.

Jens Wrona is Professor for New Economic Geography and East Asia at the Mercator School of Management and the Institute for East Asian Studies of the University of Duisburg-Essen. Before joining the University of Duisburg-Essen he held a position as a Junior-Professor for International Economics at the Heinrich-Heine University Düsseldorf. Jens Wrona studied Economics and Japanese Studies at the Eberhard Karls University Tübingen and at the Dôshisha University in Kyôto. He is doing theoretical and empirical research in international, regional, and labour economics. Jens Wrona is an external reserach affiliate at the Düsseldorf Institute for Competition Economics (DICE) and a CESifo Research Network affiliate.

Mercator Fellows

Arnaud Chevalier is Professor of Economics at Royal Holloway, University of London. He obtained his PhD at the University of Birmingham and joined the London School of Economics for a post-doc. This was followed by a Marie Currie post-doc at University College Dublin. He then worked at UCD and University of Kent, before joining Royal Holloway in 2006, where he became a full professor in 2016.

Arnaud’s research interest is broadly in applied labour economics. Research topics among others include fertility decisions, education decision, discrimination and crime. From 2007 to 2014, he was the associate editor and then editor of the Journal of the Royal statistical society, and since 2014 is an editor for the IZA World of Labor. Since 2017, he is a member of the European Association of Labour Economists executive committee. From 2017 to 2020, he was head of the economics department at Royal Holloway.

Wilhelm Kohler is an Emeritus Professor of Economics at Eberhard Karls University Tübingen. He worked there as a member of the Faculty of Economics and Social Sciences from October 2004 to March 2022. Since 2013, he has also been serving as a Scientific Director at the Institute for Applied Economic Research (IAW) at the Universität Tübingen. He is a Fellow of the CESifo Research Network and Research Professor at the Ifo Center for International Economics. His research fields are international trade (comparative advantage, offshoring, trade policy), international migration, and European integration.

Before his position at the University of Tübingen, Kohler worked at the Johannes Kepler University Linz, University of Duisburg-Essen, University of Innsbruck, University of Birmingham (UK) and University of Michigan in the USA.

Andrea Weber is an applied labor economist and her current research focuses on the interaction of labor markets with social insurance systems, the dynamics of unemployment, gender differences in the labor market, and the mobility of workers in the European Union.

Andrea Weber received her Doctorate at the Vienna University of Technology in 2002. Prior to joining CEU she was professor of labor economics at the Vienna University of Economics and Business, professor of economics at the University of Mannheim, and visiting assistant professor at UC Berkeley.