People

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

Prof. Dr. Thomas K. Bauer (RUB)​

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 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.

Read more: 

https://www.rwi-essen.de/rwi/team/person/thomas-k-bauer

Prof. Dr. Thushyanthan Baskaran (TUD)

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.

Prof. Dr. Lukas Buchheim (TUD)

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

Prof. Dr. Christiane Hellmanzik (TUD)

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

Prof. Dr. Philip Jung (TUD)

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.

Read more: https://sites.google.com/site/profphilipjung/

Prof. Dr. Martin Karlsson (UDE)

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.

Read more: https://www.goek.wiwi.uni-due.de/team/martin-karlsson/

Jun.-Prof. Dr. Sanne Kruse-Becher (RUB)

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.                                                

Prof. Dr. Marie Paul (UDE)

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”.

Read more: https://sites.google.com/site/marieelinapaul/home

Prof. Dr. Nadine Riedel (Münster)

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.

Read more:

https://www.wiwi.ruhr-uni-bochum.de/fiwipo/team/riedel.html.de

Prof. Dr. Tobias Seidel (UDE), Spokesperson

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.

Read more: https://sites.google.com/site/tobiasseideluni/home-1

JProf. Dr. Jens Wrona (UDE)

​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.  

Read more:​ http://www.jenswrona.com/

Prof. Galina Zudenkova, PhD (TUD)

Galina Zudenkova is Professor of Public Finance at the Faculty of Business and Economics at the Technische Universität Dortmund (TU Dortmund University), Germany. She received her Ph.D. from University Carlos III Madrid, Spain. While earning the degree she was a visiting fellow at New York University, United States. Before she was appointed Assistant Professor in the Department of Economics at the University of Mannheim, Germany, she worked as Assistant Professor at the University Rovira i Virgili, Spain.

Her research interests lie in the areas of Applied Microeconomics, Public Economics, Political Economy, Law and Economics, and Institutional Economics. Within these fields, she focuses on the game theoretical analysis of the interactions between agents in economic and political environments and test empirically the derived hypotheses. In her previous and current research, she studies theoretically and empirically the questions of policy choice and policy implementation with the focus on principal-agent relationships, redistribution, public good provision, politician selection and institutional regime change.

Read more:

https://of.wiwi.tu-dortmund.de/team/galina-zudenkova/

Mercator Fellow

Prof.Dr. Arnaud Chevalier (Royal Holloway)

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.

Prof. Dr. Wilhelm Kohler (University of Tübingen)

Wilhelm Kohler is an Emeritus Professor of Economics at Eberhard Karls University of Tübingen. He taught and worked there as a member of the Faculty of Economics and Social Sciences from October 2004 to March 2022. He has been serving as a Scientific Director at the Institute for Applied Economic Research (IAW) at the same university since 2013. Before his position at the University of Tübingen, Kohler worked as a professor at the Johannes Kepler University of Linz and at the University of Duisburg-Essen, as a junior professor at the University of Innsbruck, and as a visiting professor at University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Kohler’s research fields are international trade (comparative advantage, offshoring, trade policy), international migration, and European integration. He is also a fellow of the CESifo Research Network and Research Professor at the Ifo Center for International Economics.

Coordinator

Cagla Diner (UDE)

Cagla Diner joined the RTG in March 2022 to support the team in organizational and budgetary tasks. She holds a PhD in Sociology from the Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, USA and a degree in Economics from Bogazici University in Istanbul, Turkey. Before moving to Essen in 2018 as an Academy in Exile Fellow, she had worked and taught at Bilkent University in Ankara, Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, and Kadir Has University in Istanbul.

E-mail: cagla.diner-eken@uni-due.de

Cohort 2022

Kevin Berlet (RUB)

Kevin Berlet joined the RTG in 2022 at the Chair of Sanne Kruse-Becher at the Ruhr University Bochum as a PhD student. He obtained his Bachelor and Master degree in Business Administration and Economics at the Technical University Dortmund with a specialization in economics during the Master. In his Bachelor Thesis he investigated Quantitative Easing and its effect on bank lending. For his Master Thesis he empirically analyzed military spending and fiscal multipliers for selected individual countries and a panel data set. During his studies he worked at several chairs in teaching and assistant positions.

His research interests are macroeconomics, fiscal and monetary policy as well as (micro-)econometric applications of the afore mentioned research fields.

E-Mail: kevin.berlet@ruhr-uni-bochum.de

Lorenz Gschwent (UDE)

Lorenz Gschwent is a PhD student at the chair of Tobias Seidel at the University of Duisburg-Essen. He holds a Bachelor’s and Master’s degree in Economics from the University of Vienna, as well as a Bachelor’s in Communication Science. During his studies, he spent an Erasmus semester at the Aix-Marseille School of Economics. Before joining the RTG in October 2022, he worked as a research assistant at the Vienna Institute of International Economic Studies (wiiw) and the Wyss Academy for Nature at the University of Bern. Lorenz’ research interests lie in regional economics and political economy. He is also interested in novel data sources, in particular text as data.

Email: lorenz.gschwent@uni-due.de

Niklas Hübner (TUD)

Niklas Hübner has been working as a doctoral researcher at the Chair of Galina Zudenkova at TU Dortmund since October 2022.  He obtained his Bachelor in Economics from the Goethe University in Frankfurt and holds a Master degree in Economics from the University of Cologne. Until starting as a doctoral researcher at the RTG he worked as a student researcher at the Research Data Center Ruhr of the RWI.

Niklas’ research interests include political economics, regional economics and migration economics.

E-Mail: niklas.huebner@tu-dortmund.de

Lennart Palm (UDE)

Lennart Palm joined the RTG in 2022 as a PhD student at the Chair of Prof. Dr. Jens Wrona at the University of Duisburg-Essen (UDE). He completed his undergraduate studies in Economics at the Georg-August University Göttingen and his graduate studies at the TU Dresden. During his time at TU Dresden he spent an exchange Semester at the Dankook University in South Korea. In his master thesis he studied the impact of district proliferation on public health care provision in Indononesia. His reseach interests include urban economics, regional economics and international trade.

Email: lennart.palm.uni@uni-due.de

Nuran Yildirim (UDE)

Nuran Yildirim joined the RTG at the Chair of Martin Karlsson at the University of Duisburg-Essen in 2022. She holds a Master’s degree in Applied Economics and Social Development from National Chengchi University,Taipei City and Bachelor’s degree in Political Science and Public Administration from Middle East Technical University, Ankara with an exchange semester at Babeș-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca. During her graduate studies, Nuran worked as a teaching assistant for Econometrics and Health Economics classes. In her master’s thesis she investigated the spatial accessibility to health care services in Turkey and her current research involves studying the impact of railway infrastructure in Sweden.

Nuran’s research interests include political economy, health economics, regional economics, and spatial data analysis.

Email: nuran.yildirim@uni-due.de

Cohort 2021

Tobias Büscher (TUD)

Tobias Büscher joined RTG in October 2021. He obtained his Bachelor in Economics at the University of Münster and his Master in Economics at TU Dortmund University. In his studies he focused on applied economics in the fields of environmental and public economics in a regional context. In his master thesis he conducted a survival analysis and examined the effects of a strong publicly funded research environment in a region on the longevity of digital firm clusters. He showed that the connectedness of high-tech firms to such a research environment decreases the risk of failure. During his studies Tobias Büscher also worked as a student research assistant at the chair of Public Economics run by Prof. Galina Zudenkova.

Email: tobias2.buescher@tu-dortmund.de

Felix Dornseifer (TUD)

Felix Dornseifer is a PhD student at TU Dortmund University at the Chair of Christiane Hellmanzik and joined the third cohort of the RTG in 2021. Previously, he completed a B.Sc. in Economics and an M.Sc. in Economics, both at the University of Bonn and spent an Erasmus semester at the University College Cork in Ireland. He gained work experience at a local bank and interned at two consultancy firms. Felix is interested in International, Regional and Trade Economics as well as Finance. His most recent work focuses on the influence of social connectedness on financial flows and economic decision making.

Email: felix.dornseifer@tu-dortmund.de

Joschka Flintz (RUB)

Joschka Flintz joined the RTG in October 2021. He is a PhD student at the chair of Thomas Bauer at the Ruhr University Bochum, where he already obtained his Bachelors and Masters degree in Economics. Besides, he is working as a research assistant at the RWI in the department “Environment and Resources”. In his master thesis he analyzed the impact of the German car taxation scheme on car fleet composition and its effectiveness in terms of reducing CO2 emissions from motorized individual transport. Joschka’s research interests include environmental economics, regional and urban economics, especially with regards to mobility and transportation issues, as well as applied microeconometrics.

Email: joschka.flintz@rub.de

Jakob Gutschlhofer (UDE)

Jakob Gutschlhofer joined the RTG at the chair of Jens Wrona at University of Duisburg-Essen (UDE) in 2021. He holds a MSc in Economics and BSc in Business, Economics and Social Sciences from Vienna University of Economics and Business (WU) and a BA in Political Sciences from University of Vienna. Prior to completing his studies, he worked at the research group “Global Resource Use” at WU Vienna.

Jakob’s research interests include environmental economics, regional heterogeneity, political economy, and applied microeconomics.

E-Mail: jakob.gutschlhofer@uni-due.de

Max Perl (UDE)

Max Perl is a PhD student at the Chair of Martin Karlsson at the University of Duisburg-Essen. He obtained master’s degrees from the Paris School of Economics and University of Mannheim. Max completed his undergraduate studies at Lancaster University, spending two semesters at the University of New South Wales in Sydney. Prior to joining the Research Training Group, he worked in risk management for Germany’s largest financial services group. Max’s research interests lie in urban and labor economics.

E-Mail: maximilian.perl@ibes.uni-due.de

Max Schäfer (UDE)

In Fall 2021 Max Schäfer joined the RTG and Prof. Marie Paul’s chair at the University of Duisburg-Essen as a PhD student. Before, he studied Economics in Mannheim and Bonn and spent his exchange semester at Católica Lisbon in Portugal. In his master thesis he empirically investigated the effect of individual and regional unemployment on job loss expectations and life satisfaction in East Germany shortly after reunification. During his studies he worked as a research assistant at different institutes. With an interest in broad labor economics Max emphasizes the regional dimension and uses the toolkit of applied microeconometrics.

Email: max.schaefer@uni-due.de

Nuan Stahl (UDE)

Nuan Stahl joined the RTG in 2021. She is a PhD student at the Chair of Marie Paul at the University of Duisburg-Essen. She studied Economics at the University of Konstanz and spent an exchange semester at the University of Tartu in Estonia. During her studies, she gained work experience in the Controlling departments of two firms and as a research assistant at the Chair of Economic Policy at the University of Konstanz.

Nuan is interested in applied microeconomics, mainly labor economics and family economics.

E-Mail: nuan.stahl@uni-due.de

Cohort 2020

Malte Borghorst (UDE)

Malte Borghorst started a Ph.D. at the chair of Tobias Seidel at the University of Duisburg-Essen (UDE) in 2020. He holds a Msc. in Economics from the University of Copenhagen and a Bsc. in Economics from the Freie Universität Berlin.

Prior to joining the RTG, he worked as a Research Assistant at the Transport Economics Group of the Technical University of Denmark and the BUILT Department of the Aalborg University.

Malte is interested in labor economics, urban economics and applied microeconometrics.

Current projects include workers commuting decisions and their contribution to the gender wage gap, and the gender specific urban wage premium for experience.

E-Mail: malte.borghorst@uni-due.de

Knarik Poghosyan (TUD)

Knarik Poghosyan joined the RTG in 2020. She is a PhD student at the chair of Philip Jung at the Technical University Dortmund. Knarik holds Bachelor’s and Master’s Degrees in Management from the Armenian State University of Economics. Further, she obtained Master’s degree in Economics from the Friedrich Schiller University of Jena. Moreover, she interned at the Ministry of Economic Development and Investments (Armenia), Carl Zeiss Microscopy (Germany) and completed an Erasmus Traineeship program in Spain.

In her Master’s thesis she empirically analysed the impact of cluster policy on the structure of inventors’ collaboration network.

Her research interests are innovation and regional economics as well as social network analysis.

E-Mail: Knarik.Poghosyan@tu-dortmund.de

Eyayaw Teka Beze (UDE))

Eyayaw Teka Beze joined the Ruhr Graduate School in Economics in October 2019. He received a bachelor’s degree in economics from Bahir Dar University in Ethiopia, and a master’s degree in development policy from KDI School in South Korea. He worked as a graduate assistant (from June 2012-August 2014) and later as a lecturer of economics (from December 2015-August 2017) at Jimma University. He subsequently earned a second master’s degree in Comparative Local Development from a consortium of four European universities (the Corvinus University of Budapest, University of Regensburg, University of Trento, and the University of Ljubljana) and worked as an intern at the Leibniz Institute for East and Southeast European Studies in Regensburg, Germany. In his first master’s thesis, he decomposed economic growth in selected African countries. His second thesis analyzed the causal relationship between energy consumption and economic growth in east African countries.

Research interests: Regional and Urban Economics, Development Economics,International Economics, Data Science.

E-Mail: eyayaw.beze@uni-due.de

Anna Temel (RUB)

Anna Temel joined the RTG in 2020. She is a PhD student at the chair of Thomas Bauer at the Ruhr-University Bochum, where she also obtained her Bachelors and Masters degree in Management and Economics (BSc.) and Economic Policy Consulting (MSc.). Before she commenced her Phd studies, she gained work experience as an analyst in a policy consulting firm and during internships in different research institutions and in the energy sector.

Anna is interested in environmental economics, the analysis of regional disparities and applied microeconometrics

E-Mail: anna.temel@ruhr-uni-bochum.de

Siegfried To (UDE)

Siegfried To joined the chair of Tobias Seidel at the Mercator School of Management (MSM) in 2020.

Siegfried did his B.Sc. in Economics with a Political and Computer Science minor as well as a Master’s in Economics at the University of Heidelberg and Mannheim respectively. He spent one semester abroad at the Keio University in Tokyo.

His Bachelor’s thesis was concerned with the network analysis of international trade flows while his Master’s thesis was concerned with the prediction of economic time series using Machine Learning algorithms.

Siegfried’s research interests are the application of Machine Learning methods in Economics as well as regional heterogeneity.

E-Mail: siegfried.to@uni-due.de

Lu Wei (UDE)

Lu Wei joined the second RTG cohort as a PhD student in 2020 at the chair of Prof. Dr. Tobias Seidel at the Mercator School of Management (MSM), University of Duisburg-Essen. She studied International Banking and Finance at the Shanghai University of Finance and Economics, where she obtained her Bachelor’s degree. After serving as a mutual fund researcher and an investment manager, Lu has developed a keen on Economics. In 2018, she came to Germany and pursued her Master’s degree in Economics at the Eberhard Karls University of Tübingen, where shegained theoretical and empirical expertise in international trade.

Lu has strong interests in international economics, regional economics
and econometrics.

E-mail: lu.wei@uni-due.de

Cohort 2019

Avtandil Abashishvili (TUD)

Born in Georgia and after obtaining bachelor’s degree from Tbilisi State University, Avtandil came to Germany and received MSc degree in international economics at the University of Mainz. After finishing the master studies, as part of the first cohort, he joined RTG team at the chair of Prof. Dr. Philip Jung (TUD).

Avtandil is an alumnus of US State department financed Future Leaders Exchange Program and DAAD ERP study scholarship. He has more than three years of professional working experience at private and public institutions, including Tbilisi Municipality City Hall. Besides, he is an active film photographer and mountaineer.

His research interests are international trade, labor and regional economics.

E-Mail: avtandil.abashishvili@tu-dortmund.de

Nina Furbach (TUD)

Nina Furbach started her PhD in 2018 at the Ruhr Graduate School in Economics. She is working at the chair of Philip Jung (TUD) and joined the first cohort of the RTG in 2019. She holds a bachelor’s degree from the University of Heidelberg and a master’s degree from the University of Bonn, both in economics. She further interned at the German Central Bank and completed the ECB’s traineeship program.

Nina is interested in macroeconomics, monetary and public economics as well as inequality.

E-Mail: Nina.Furbach@tu-dortmund.de

Johannes Gallé (RUB)

Johannes Gallé is a PhD student at the chair of Thomas Bauer at the Ruhr-University Bochum (RUB) and is part of the first cohort of the RTG. He studied economics at the University of Freiburg, where he obtained his Bachelors and Masters degree. In his thesis, he empirically analyzed the contemporary nexus of local institutions and civil conflict in India. Furthermore, Johannes spent one semester abroad at the University of Auckland and completed several internships, e.g. at the Indo-German Chamber of Commerce in Pune and a voluntary service in a residential care home in Auckland.

His research interests are international and development economics, political economy and applied microeconometrics.

E-Mail: Johannes.Galle@ruhr-uni-bochum.de

Maren Kaliske (TUD)

Maren Kaliske is holding a Bachelor in Politics and Economics from the University Münster, Germany and a Master in Economics from Trinity College Dublin, Ireland. She is now a PhD student at the chair of Christiane Hellmanzik at the Technical University Dortmund, Germany.

In her Master thesis she empirically examined the effect of globalization measured by changes in the regional exposure to trade on the electoral success of the AfD in German federal elections.

Her Research interests are regional and urban development, digitization, international trade and political economy.

E-Mail: Maren.Kaliske@tu-dortmund.de

Philipp Markus (UDE)

Philipp Markus started his PhD in 2018 at the Ruhr Graduate School in Economics. In 2019, he joined the RTG at the chair of Tobias Seidel (UDE). Philipp studied economics in Bonn and Cologne where he obtained his Bachelors and Masters degrees. Moreover, he gained work experience at a research and consulting company and did an internship at the Tanzanian Trade Development Authority (TanTrade).

Philipp is interested in the general topic of inequality including regional and urban economics as well as public economics and political economy. Currently, he works on the measurement of local amenities in the context of regional disparities.

E-Mail: philipp.markus@uni-due.de

Lea Nassal (UDE)

Lea Nassal is a PhD student at the chair of Marie Paul at the University of Duisburg-Essen (UDE). Prior to joining the RTG, she studied economics at the University of Bonn where she received her Bachelor’s and Master’s degree.

Lea’s research interests are labor economics (especially female labor market decisions), health economics and development economics

E-Mail: lea.nassal@uni-due.de

Diem Hoang Xuan (UDE)

Diem was working as a junior researcher at the Central Institute for Economic Management (CIEM), Vietnam before she commenced her PhD study at the Graduate School “Regional Disparities and Economic Policies” since October, 2019. Diem obtained her Bachelor Degree in International Economics from the Vietnam National University, Hanoi and her Master Degree in International and Development Economics from the Australian National University.

Diem’s research interests include development economics, labor economics, health economics and developing economies.

E-Mail: diem.hoang-xuan@wiwinf.uni-due.de