Christian Vedel
I am an Assistant Professor at the Historical Economics and Development Group (HEDG) at the Department of Economics at the University of Southern Denmark (SDU).
I am interested in expanding our knowledge of how geography and institutions shape living conditions. I do most of my work using techniques from causal inference and machine learning on large amounts of historical georeferenced data.
In 2023, I received the 'New Researcher Prize' from the Economic History Society for my paper, which is available in a short version under 'Research'.
I wrote my dissertation under the supervision of Paul Sharp and co-supervisors Casper Worm Hansen and Christian Møller Dahl.
Email: Christian-vs@sam.sdu.dk
Breaking the HISCO Barrier: Automatic Occupational Standardization with OccCANINE
With Christian Møller-Dahl and Torben Johansen
This paper introduces a new tool, OccCANINE, to automatically transform occupational descriptions into the HISCO classification system. The manual work involved in processing and classifying occupational descriptions is error-prone, tedious, and time-consuming. We finetune a preexisting language model (CANINE) to do this automatically thereby performing in seconds and minutes what previously took days and weeks. The model is trained on 14 million pairs of occupational descriptions and HISCO codes in 13 different languages contributed by 22 different sources. Our approach is shown to have accuracy, recall and precision above 90 percent. Our tool breaks the metaphorical HISCO barrier and makes this data readily available for analysis of occupational structures with broad applicability in economics, economic history and various related disciplines.
Read more in the working paper on arxiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.13604
For instructions on how to use OccCANINE, slides, and much more see:
https://github.com/christianvedels/OccCANINE
Education
2020-2023 PhD in Economics
University of Southern Denmark
Committee: Greg Clark, Neil Cummins, Kerstin Enflo
2022 spring Visiting Research Student
London School of Economics
2018-2021 Master of science in Economics
Unversity of Southern Denmark
2015-2018 Bachelor of science in Economics
University of Southern Denmark
2010-2013 International Baccalaureate Diploma
Nyborg Gymnasium, Fyn, Denmark
Funding and prizes
I was the winner of the Economic History Society's New Researcher prize of 2023.
I was awarded 15.000 DKK by 'Augustinus fonden' to help cover expenses for my 4 months stay at the Department of Economic History at LSE in the spring of 2022.
Refeering
Scandinavian Economic History Review
Community
Board member of the Danish Society for Economic and Social history
'The idea of enlightenment in the 21st century' (Midjourney)
Teaching
2024S Microeconomics
(Continued) Introductory microeconomics for undergraduate business school students
2023F News and Market Sentiment Analysis
Data science Master's course in Natural Language Processing
Find slides and more on the public GitHub repository
2023F Microeconomics
Introductory microeconomics for undergraduate business school students
2022F Business History (undergraduate)
I lecturered in this course together with Elena Korchmina
2020-2022 Tietgen talent track
Talent track for high school students from Tietgen business high school. I coordinate the program and teach everything from basic economic theory to latest research and basic statistics
2020F Introduction to Business and Economic History (undergraduate)
Teaching assistant (partly online due to COVID)
2020-2021 Regression Analysis (undergraduate)
Guest lecture for one week both years. Taught introduction to the R statistical programming language.
2020S Econometrics II (undergraduate)
Teaching assistant (partly online due to COVID)
2017F Macroeconomics (undergraduate)
Teaching assistant