Markus Eberhardt

ACADEMIC BIO I'm an empirical economist at the School of Economics, University of Nottingham. After 2.5 years of undergraduate studies in German literature and Sinology at the University of Freiburg (Germany) I moved to Beijing (Renmin University) for two years in the late 1990s to study Mandarin. I then entered the final year of the BA in Modern Chinese Studies at Leeds University and graduated in 2000. After working for a year I entered the MA Development Economics programme of the School of Development Studies at UEA in Norwich. From 2002-2004 I was employed by the School of Management, University of Bath, on a project investigating sourcing strategies of manufacturing MNCs in China, for which I was based in Shanghai during 2003 and interviewed over 80 companies along China's Eastern Seaboard. In autumn 2004 I moved to Oxford to study on the MPhil in Economics, followed by the DPhil from 2006-9. I stayed on as a post-doc in the Centre for the Study of African Economies until 2011 when I moved to Nottingham. I was promoted to Associate Professor in 2017.

RESEARCH My current research interests include financial crises, Qing China in the 18th and 19th centuries, democracy and economic development, and knowledge spillovers/absorptive capacity. The common denominator of these diverse topics is an empirical one, namely 'second generation' macro panel econometrics in linear and more recently nonlinear models.

LATEST NEWS December 2020: We resubmitted our paper on banking crises in Low-Income Countries (with Andrea Presbitero) to the Journal of International Economics. We study a sample of 60 LICs from 1963-2015 and added a historical sample for 40 'peripheral' economies covering 1848-1938. The bottom line is that aggregate commodity price volatility is a significant predictor of banking crises, the mechanism seems to work through a fiscal channel (lower revenues, higher debt in general, reduction in maturity of the debt) which we trace in additional empirical exercises.

September 2020: My paper on public debt and growth (with Andrea Presbitero) came in 3rd place in the Google Scholar ranking for the Journal of International Economics (on the basis of citations for 2015-19).

March 2020: The revised draft of my paper on absorptive capacity evolution in advanced economies (with Stef De Visscher, Gerdie Everaert, both Ghent) has been accepted at the Journal of International Economics. We adopt a common factor model with time-varying country-specific factor loadings to obtain an estimated measure for absorptive capacity which do not assume any specific 'transmission channels' (trade, FDI, physical proximity,...) or observable variables (e.g. R&D, financial development, human capital,...). A new extension to the model still allows for unobserved determinants but also includes R&D, fin-dev, HC, and regulation/competition policy (which turned out to be quite tricky). The revised draft is here.

Last changed: December 22, 2020