Welcome
... to my private website.
I am a Professor of Empirical Microeconomics at the Department of Economics at the University of Bamberg.
I studied economics at the University of Bamberg, Germany, and the University of Jyväskylä, Finland. I received a Diploma (M.Sc. equiv.) in 1998 and a Ph.D. in economics at the University of Bamberg in 2004 for my dissertation "Do Catholic women with non-smoking husbands earn less in a second job? - Assorted topics in empirical labor economics" (supervised by Johannes Schwarze †). I worked as research assistant to John Komlos at the University of Munich in Winter 2003-04 and as post-doctoral research fellow at the Austrian Institute for Family Studies, Vienna, from 2004 to 2005. I was assistant professor at the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg (chair of Regina T. Riphahn) from October 2005 to January 2009. From February 2009 to March 2011, I was the Head of the Research Department "Education and Employment over the Life Course" at the Institute for Employment Research (IAB)
My current research focuses on the formation of and the returns to cognitive and non-cognitive skills. My work has been published in journals including Industrial and Labor Relations Review, Labour Economics, Economics Letters, Journal of Population Econonmics, Jahrbücher für Nationalökonomie und Statistik, Applied Economics Letters, Labour: Review of Labour Economics and Industrial Relations, and Journal of Socio-Economics.
I am a member of the Ausschuss für Bevölkerungsökonomik, and the Ausschuss für Bildungsökonomie of the German Economic Association (Verein für Socialpolitik), a member of the Council of the Scottish Economic Society, an IZA Research Fellow, and a research associate of the Labor and Socio-Economic Research Center (LASER) within the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg.