Empirical Projects

Master’s Thesis: Investigating Unemployment and Rearmament in the Nazi Economy (Spring 2025)

Can rearmament boost employment? I estimate the causal effect of military spending on unemployment in Nazi Germany between 1932 and 1936, using novel archival data on the German Luftwaffe. Exploiting cross-district variation in exposure to rearmament, I construct a regional measure of defense spending based on the location of Luftwaffe suppliers. Linking firms to employment districts, I estimate the impact of military procurement on local labor market outcomes. I find that unemployment per capita declined by approximately 3 percentage points in districts with at least one Luftwaffe supplier, relative to districts without. Estimating the effect year-by-year suggest even larger effects of up to 5 percentage points. Overall, the results suggest that Nazi government spending could account for up to 45% of the total reduction in unemployment between 1932 and 1936, of which approximately 14% can be attributed to rearmament.

Paper | Slides (defended May 28, 2025) | Original Version (submitted May 16, 2025)

Bundesbank Project: Investigating Private Consumption in the Euro Area (Summer 2024)

As an intern at the DG Economics of the Bundesbank, I researched current dynamics of private consumption in the Euro area. Two main questions were of interest: first, whether the long run relationship between private consumption and its determinants had changed since the COVID-19 pandemic, and second, how short-run consumption fluctuations since 2020 could be explained. To do so, we estimated an error-correction model (ECM) and performed a principal component analysis (PCA) on sentiment indicator data to include them as additional explanatory variables. We find significant changes in the long-run relationship between consumption and its determinants, driven by income and financial wealth variables.

A more detailed summary is available here.