Damian Osterwalder

Welcome!

I am an Economist in the Statistics Division at the Swiss National Bank and a research affiliate at the University of Zurich. I completed my PhD in Economics at the University of Zurich in January 2025, and I hold an MA in Economics with a Minor in Data Science from the University of Zurich.

Previously, I was a visiting pre-doctoral research associate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and a research assistant for Prof. Dr. Josef Zweimüller at the University of Zurich. I have also held prior roles at the Swiss National Bank (SNB). From September 2023 to April 2024, I was a visiting researcher at the Institute for Research on Labor and Employment (IRLE) at UC Berkeley, hosted by Prof. Benjamin Schoefer.

My research interests are Labor Economics and Public Economics, with a focus on social insurance and job matching. Currently, I am working on the optimal design of unemployment insurance systems in the context of repeated unemployment, the business cycle dynamics of vacancies, and the long-term effects of short-time work programs using large-scale administrative data. My previous work has examined the labor market effects of immigration and the relationship between vacancy durations and entry wages.