Damian Osterwalder
PhD Candidate, Department of Economics, University of Zurich
Welcome!
I am a fifth year PhD student in Economics at the University of Zurich. I hold an MA in Economics with a Minor in Data Science from the University of Zurich. Previously I worked at the Swiss National Bank (SNB) as well as a research assistant for Prof. Dr. Josef Zweimüller at the University of Zurich, and I was a visiting pre-doctoral research associate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).
My research interests are Labor Economics and Public Economics, with a focus on social insurance and job matching. Currently, I am working on the optimality of unemployment insurance systems in the presence of repeated unemployment, the business cycle dynamics of vacancies, and the long-run impact of short-time work programs using large-scale administrative data. Previously, I have been working on the labor market effects of immigration and the relationship between vacancy durations and entry wages.
I visited the Institute for Research on Labor and Employment (IRLE) at UC Berkeley from September 2023 until April 2024, hosted by Prof. Benjamin Schoefer.