About me

Welcome! I'm an applied economist working on the causal evaluation of social, labour-market and environmental policy. I'm a postdoctoral researcher at the German Federal Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (BAuA), in the secretariat of Germany's Minimum Wage Commission. My work there ranges from independent research on the employment and distributional effects of the statutory minimum wage to the design and scientific supervision of commissioned evaluation studies and the Commission's biennial reports to the federal government. 

I am also affiliated with the German Institute for Economic Research (DIW Berlin), where I worked as a doctoral and postdoctoral researcher. My published research uses quasi-experimental methods — difference-in-differences, panel and IV designs — to study how social and environmental policies shape health, human capital and inequality, including the effects of air pollution and of education and family policy. A recurring thread is how conditions of work and life at the lower end of the distribution affect well-being, and how to produce evidence that wage-setting and social-policy institutions can actually use.

Before my PhD, I worked at the International Labour Organization (ILO) on social protection and employment policy, including microsimulation of social-protection reforms

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Feel free to contact me via email (laura.schmitz@posteo.de).