About me

Welcome!

I am an empirical economist interested in both research and policy applications across a broad range of domains,  from monetary economics to  labour markets to social affairs.  

I obtained my PhD in Economics from the Central European University in 2017. My thesis entitled "History as an Agent of Growth: Natural Experiments from Central Europe" and used hand-collected statistical data from 19th-century Hungary to study the causal effects of socio-cultural factors and infrastructure (such as ethnic and religious diversity, Protestantism, railroads) on economic growth and development.  

Currently, I am a visiting fellow at the INVEST Research Flagship Centre of the University of Turku where I work on socio-economic transformations with linked employer-employee data from Finnish registers. Prior to that, I was a research economist at the Directorate for Fair and Sustainable Economy of the European Commission's Joint Research Centre (JRC), focusing on socio-economic resilience, poverty measurement, household finances and the distributional analysis. The ABSPO research project I coordinated produced the first set of cross-country comparable absolute poverty lines across the EU, with its results and methodologies now published as a handbook by Palgrave Macmillan.

My earlier work experience comes from

• the Development Research Group of the World Bank,

• the Directorate for Employment, Labour and Social Affairs of the OECD, 

• the Banking Groups Supervision Division of the Hungarian Financial Supervisory Authority,

• the Research Departments of the Federal Reserve Banks of Boston & New York.