Lorenz Gschwent

Lorenz Gschwent

PhD student @ University of Duisburg-Essen

Welcome

I am a PhD student in Economics at the University of Duisburg-Essen and a member of the Research Training Group 2484 Regional Disaprities and Economic Policy. My main research interests are in Political Economy, Regional and Innovation Economics.

Publications

The Rise of Health Economics: Transforming the Landscape of Economic Research (with Björn Hammarfelt, Martin Karlsson, and Mathias Kifmann). Health Economics

Abstract | Paper This paper explores the evolving role of health economics within economic research and publishing over the past 30 years. Historically, largely a niche field, health economics has become increasingly prominent, with the share of health economics papers in top journals growing significantly. We aim to identify the factors behind this rise. Using a combination of bibliometric methods and natural language processing (NLP), we classify abstracts to define health economics. Adapting NLP methods to evaluate the novelty, impact, and quality of academic papers, we demonstrate that the mainstreaming of health economics is driven by innovative, high-quality research, with two notable waves in quality ratings that highlight the emergence and impact of distinct subfields within the discipline. We find a strong positive correlation between citations and quality ratings, with health economics papers receiving fewer citations for their quality compared to other economics fields. Pandemic-related research received a high number of citations during 2020 and 2021; however, our findings indicate that this work was not systematically more novel or impactful than prior studies within the same subfield.


Current projects

Censorship in Democracy (with Marcel Caesmann, and Matteo Grigoletto). Submitted

Abstract | Updated Draft | Working Paper | VoxEU Column The spread of propaganda and misinformation from autocratic regimes is a growing concern in democracies. We study the European Union’s ban on Russian state-backed news outlets after the 2022 invasion of Ukraine, analyzing 677,780 tweets from 146,633 users with a difference-in-differences design in a daily panel. The ban reduced pro-Russian tweets by 10.9\% per active user day, with strongest effects among users directly connected to the banned outlets. We find no evidence of substitution to secondary suppliers. Evidence on mechanisms indicates that the ban curtailed pro-Russian content by removing key agenda-setters. Finally, we examine the costs of censorship in a democratic context: A pre-registered experiment finds reduced satisfaction with free speech, particularly among political centrists.


The Effect of a Vacancy Ban on German Housing Markets (with Jakob Gutschlhofer)

Quality, Scope, and Leniency: Strategic Application Behavior at the US Patent Office

Abstract Patent office outcomes have a significant influence on the quality and direction of innovation and technological growth. In this paper, I describe how incentive misalignments between applicants and examiners at the US Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) generate unintended effects across the distribution of the quality of patent applications' underlying inventions. I introduce a novel measurement of invention quality based on state-of-the-art natural language processing (NLP) techniques. I use this measure to document novel stylized facts: higher-quality inventions face lower acceptance rates but receive broader intellectual property rights when granted. To explain these patterns, I develop a theoretical model of strategic interaction between applicants and examiners. The model guides an empirical investigation that reveals a bimodal pattern of patents accepted due to lenient examiners over the distribution of quality. I show that this U-shaped distribution arises due to higher incentives for low- and high-quality applicants to ``gamble" on lenient examiners when selecting the scope of their applications. These findings underscore the importance of USPTO reform targeting the underlying incentive structure and imply that uniform policy reforms may discourage patent applications by high-quality inventors.