Causal Effects for Economic Policy

What are the labour market effects of a withdrawal of government guarantees for banks? What are the effects of government debt on growth? How big are human capital externalities? These are ongoing research projects on which Georg Gebhardt will work during his research stay at CES. These projects share a common methodological thread. They try to identify causal relationships in the data relying on regional (as opposed to cross-country or time-series) variation. In this case, the differential impact of the abolition of government guarantees for German savings banks on different German counties; the differences in debt levels between small and large German states; the change in average education levels around the locations of re-founded Eastern German Universities.

Regions within countries often share many characteristics (e.g. monetary policy or the legal system); hence, using regional data lets the researcher get closer to the experimental ideal, but it also poses serious questions of interpretation and external validity of the results, as the implications will usually be applied to whole countries. Looking at recent papers using this approach, Georg Gebhardt will analyse the potential contributions and pitfalls of using regional data in a series of CES lectures titled: "Using Regional Data to Identify Causal Effects for Economic Policy".

Georg Gebhardt is an applied Microeconomist with broad research interests including financial and labour economics. He has been a full professor of economics at Ulm University since 2010. He received his doctorate from the University of Munich in 1997. Afterwards he was an assistant Professor (C1) at the Department of Economics at the University of Munich and a visiting scholar at the University of Chicago, Graduate School of Business. From 2009 until 2010 he held a temporary appointment as full professor without tenure (W3) at the Department of Economics, University of Cologne.