I am a doctoral student at the Chair of Applied Macroeconomics at the KOF Swiss Economic Institute, ETH Zürich. My dissertation focuses on incentive structures in the public sector. More specifically, I research under which circumstances governments are likely to manipulate the budget for electoral gain and I am developing sub-national time-varying institutional indices (corruption, poverty, other institutional factors) using household surveys.
I am also interested in demography and its connections with economic development. For instance, I have published on the benefits associated with the sub-national demographic transition and which factors can enable a larger demographic dividend. Currently, I use Facebook advertising data and Facebook network data to analyze the effect of Facebook use on desired and actual fertility, and how this relationship depends on the social network structure of Indian districts.
My personal interests lie in topics of (regional) development, particularly in sub-Saharan Africa. Topics such as development assistance, microfinance, cryptocurrency for development and grassroots funding for low- and middle- income countries fascinate me.