I’ve always enjoyed traveling and found it interesting to see how different societies function. My favorite subject in high school was history. Economists study how societies function. Their starting point is that all societies face constraints – there is not enough of some of stuff we like – and have to decide how to allocate the available resources.  In a market economy most decisions are made by individuals. Their choices depend on the incentives they face. Economists use formal models to study these tradeoffs and incentives. This approach provides a rigor that I grew to appreciate more and more. Economists are not content with hypothesizing about different phenomena. They want to test their theories and quantify effects. This approach requires an initial investment in learning some tools like mathematics and statistics, but I think the rewards, such as the ability to address problems in a more structured way and a sense for magnitudes, are well worth it.  

After graduating from the University of Augsburg in my native Germany, I enrolled in the graduate program in economics at the University of Rochester. I received my PhD in 2003 and started my current job as Assistant Professor at Texas A&M in the same year.

In my research, I study how people find jobs and how their wages are determined – I study the labor market. Understanding how the labor market works is important because the vast majority of individuals obtain most of their income by working for pay.  Labor is also our important resource, and how we utilize this resource determines the wealth of our society.

I have studied the effects of intergenerational connections in the labor market. Recently, I have become interested in the role of social networks in the labor market. We know from various surveys that information provided by social contacts is widely used in the job search process, both by potential employers and by job seekers. Economic theory predicts various consequences of the use of social referrals in job search.  For example, social networks can generate differences in income and in the probability of being unemployment.  In one of my current projects, “The Effects of Job Matching through Social Networks”, I develop a model of the labor market that allows me to quantify the magnitudes of the effects of information transmission though social networks on movements into and out of employment.  I find that information transmission through social contacts reduces the unemployment rate from a hypothetical 6.5% to an observed 5%.  They cannot explain much of the variation in wages of otherwise homogeneous workers and do not substantially influence the aggregate outcomes.