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 research interests are in Regional Economics and Political Economy.
Current projects
Censorship in Democracy (with Marcel Caesmann, Janis Goldzycher, and Matteo Grigoletto)
Abstract | Working Paper | VoxEU Column
The spread of propaganda, misinformation, and biased narratives from autocratic regimes, especially on social media, is a growing concern in many democracies. Can censorship be an effective tool to curb the spread of such slanted narratives? In this paper, we study the European Union’s ban on Russian state-led news outlets after the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine. We analyze 775,616 tweets from 133,276 users on Twitter/X, employing a difference-in-differences strategy. We show that the ban reduced pro-Russian slant among users who had previously directly interacted with banned outlets. The impact is most pronounced among users with the highest pre-ban slant levels. However, this effect was short-lived, with slant returning to its pre-ban levels within two weeks post-enforcement. Additionally, we find a detectable albeit less pronounced indirect effect on users who had not directly interacted with the outlets before the ban. We provide evidence that other suppliers of propaganda may have actively sought to mitigate the ban's influence by intensifying their activity, effectively counteracting the persistence and reach of the ban.The Rise of Health Economics: Transforming the Landscape of Economic Research (with Björn Hammarfelt, Martin Karlsson, and Mathias Kifmann)
The Effect of a Vacancy Ban on German Housing Markets (with Jakob Gutschlhofer)