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 below in its most recent version.

Email: Christian-vs@sam.sdu.dk

Check my most recent CV

A Perfect Storm: First-Nature Geography and Economic Development

Is geography destiny? What is the role of first-nature geography in determining prosperity? This paper estimates the effect of randomly removing and introducing favorable first-nature geography to a specific region using a difference in difference design. In 1825 a storm created a new natural navigable waterway, bringing trade and prosperity to the otherwise relatively isolated northwestern Denmark. 700 years prior, the same event happened in reverse, when a previous channel closed up between 1086 and 1208. The elasticity of geography-induced market access is estimated to be 1.6, corresponding to 26.7 percent population growth within a generation of the event. Demonstrated mechanisms include trade, fertility, fishing, and the rise of manufacturing. The central finding is replicated in reverse in a register of dated archaeological sites. The 1086-1208 closing caused fewer buildings and sites containing coins. The general insight is the same: First-nature geography determines the levels and location of prosperity.

The paper won the New Researcher prize, at the Economic History Society's conference in 2023.

https://arxiv.org/abs/2408.00885

I am in huge intellectual debt to historian Bo Poulsen. Read one of his latest articles on the event here: https://vbn.aau.dk/da/publications/between-adaptation-and-mitigation-the-nineteenth-century-north-se

See replication files here

https://github.com/christianvedels/A_perfect_storm_replication

YouTube video: https://youtu.be/f7Xo7BO_Xqk?si=xMAS9viHL34BGbWt

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

Demographic Research

Community

Board member of the Danish Society for Economic and Social history

Teaching

S: Spring semester; F: Fall semeter

2026S Statistics
Intro statistics for Econ undergrad students

2023F-2025F News and Market Sentiment Analysis
Data science Master's course in Natural Language Processing. Find slides and more on the public GitHub repository

2025S Statistics
Intro statistics course for Business Administration and European Studies students

2023F-2024S 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

Supervision

Co-supervision of PhD students

Maret Anne Grapengeter (UiO)

Master thesis students (Economics)

2025: Lea Lundberg Yssing, Louise Bergmann Sørensen, Sharmin Akther Keya

Master thesis students (Data Science)

2025: Lukas Rask Svendsen

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Christian Vedel