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 research interests include financial crises, democracy and economic development, and knowledge spillovers/absorptive capacity. A significant second field of interest is that of (gender, ethnic, and socio-economic) diversity in academia and knowledge production.

TEACHING    I teach a large compulsory UG Year 2 module on Applied Econometrics and am the module convenor for the (again compulsory) dissertation of our Final Year UG students. 

SERVICE    At Nottingham I am the UG admissions tutor, the data lead for the Equalities, Diversity and Integration (EDI) Committee and a member of the Marketing, Admissions, and Careers committee. Externally, I am an associate editor at Empirical Economics and a member of the editorial board at International Economics. For other 'service' see my CV.

LATEST  RESEARCH  NEWS    

April 2024: My paper 'Democracy Doesn't Always Happen Over Night: Regime Change in Stages and Economic Growth' (with Vanessa Boese-Schlosser) has been conditionally accepted at The Review of Economics and Statistics.

April 2024: My application for a Leverhulme Research Fellowship was successful and from February 2025 to July 2026 I'll be researching heterogeneity in the economic dividends to democratic regime change.

March 2024: My paper on the temperature-productivity relationship (with Rodolphe Desbordes) has been accepted for publication at the Journal of Environmental Economics and Management.

January 2024: After six years as an Affiliate I have been made a CEPR Research Fellow (Centre for Economic Policy Research) in the Macro and Growth group (directed by Nicola Fuchs-Schuendeln). 

September 2023: A user-written Stata command (ssccount) has enabled me to establish that my own Stata packages (xtmg, multipurt and xtcd) have been downloaded over 120,000 times (from within Stata using 'ssc install') since they were written and updated from 2011 onwards. 

June 2023: My paper entitled 'Gender differences in reference letters: Evidence from the Economics Job Market' with Giovanni Facchini and Valeria Rueda has now been accepted at the Economic Journal. We use natural language processing to study over 9,000 reference letters written in support of 2,800 job market candidates in economics over the 2017-2021 period. Our findings suggest that female candidates are disproportionately described using 'grindstone' terms, while at times terms their are less likely to be praised for their ability. We've added analysis of outcomes (initial placement) which demonstate that stereotyping affects women negatively on the job market.

Last changed: March 28, 2024