Welcome!

I am an Assistant Professor at the University of Innsbruck (since February 2025). 

Before that, I was an Assistant Professor at the University of Southampton and before that a Postdoctoral researcher at the University of Surrey. I completed a PhD In Economics at the University of Regensburg in 2021 in the graduate school Evidence-Based Economics (joint with LMU Munich). 

In my research, I apply and develop machine learning methods to address problems of causal inference in labor economics.

You can find my CV here.

You can contact me at 

nicolas [dot] apfel [at] uibk [dot] ac [dot] at

- NEWS -

August 13, 2024: The paper Using clustering of genetic variants in Mendelian randomization to interrogate the causal pathways underlying multimorbidity from a common risk factor which is joint work with Xiaoran Liang, Jack Bowden, Ninon Mounier, Timothy Frayling (University of Exeter), Sarah Khalid (University of Oxford) has been published in Genetic Epidemiology.

July 5, 2024: My paper Agglomerative Hierarchical Clustering for Selecting Valid Instrumental Variables, joint with Xiaoran Liang has been published in the Journal of Applied Econometrics

Jan 23, 2023: My paper Relaxing the Exclusion Restriction in Shift-Share Instrumental Variables Estimation has been published in the Journal of the Royal Statistical Society: Series A