| Home | Research | Publications | Teaching | Media | CV |
My research lies in development economics, political economy, regional economics, and international economics. A central theme of my work is spatial inequality and its consequences for economic development, conflict, and public policy.
We study the effect of working from home (WFH) on health-related absenteeism. We draw on a monthly panel (2018–2023) of nearly 1.9 million workers insured under a major German statutory health insurance fund. Our identification strategy leverages the differential exposure to the unexpected shift to WFH in 2020, resulting in about one-quarter of German employees regularly working remotely today. Specifically, our difference-in-differences design compares sick leave take-up across workers with different WFH potential, i.e., the teleworkability of their occupation in February 2020. Our results imply a nontrivial lasting response to WFH. Compared to the pre-treatment mean, the monthly likelihood of sick leave take-up declined by 3.3% by 2023 due to a 10-percentage-point increase in WFH potential (comparable to a shift from performing and entertainment professions to media documentation and information services). These effects are driven by reductions in respiratory infections and musculoskeletal disorders, such as back pain. The response reflects not only behavioral changes in sick leave take-up, but also genuine health improvements.
This paper analyses the effect of free trade agreements on urban growth. We exploit the variation of free trade agreements on the distribution of night light emissions of cities in a unique data set of tri-border areas, i.e., the exact locations where the borders of three countries touch. We run difference-in-difference estimations comparing cities in bordering regions of two countries treated by a trade agreement versus the cities in the bordering region of the third country as control. Our results show that regional trade agreements increase economic activity by 7–12\%. Heterogeneity analyses show that larger cities experience a larger impact of trade agreements on growth and cities further away from the borderline experience relatively weaker effects. A case study using Rwanda and DR Congo household data supports our main findings.
This paper studies whether access to the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) increases trade and through which margin. Using newly constructed ISO access data in a domestic-inclusive structural gravity framework for 185 trading partners from 1980 to 2016, the paper shows that ISO access is associated with substantially higher trade. Trade involving one ISO access country is about 63 percent higher than trade between countries without ISO access, while trade between two ISO access countries is about 95 percent higher. The effects are more visible for less developed countries and are stronger when the ISO access country is the exporter. Evidence on ISO certification uptake suggests that ISO access promotes trade by strengthening exporter-side standardization and certification capacity. The paper identifies ISO access as an upstream quality infrastructure channel of trade. The findings imply that standardization and certification capacity can help countries overcome non-tariff barriers and upgrade exports.