Welcome
I am a PhD student in Economics at the University of Duisburg-Essen and a member of the Research Training Group 2484 Regional Disparities and Economic Policy. I am an applied microeconomist with research interests at the intersection of the economics of science and innovation and empirical industrial organization.
I am on the 2026/27 academic job market.
Current projects
Granting Intellectual Property Rights: Invention Quality and the Scope of Protection
Job Market Paper
Abstract | Paper
A patent office judges the quality of an invention and the scope of protection the applicant requests. I measure both from the text of US patent applications and find that the outcome of examination depends far more on scope than on quality. Using the assignment of applications to examiners, I show that among granted patents, the average alternative examiner would have refused about 8.6% of the broadest requests but only 5.9% of the narrowest. Studies that use the examiner assignment to estimate what a patent does therefore describe broad requests far more than low-quality inventions. In an estimated model in which applicants choose how broadly to claim, I recover the value of scope conditional on quality and characterize granted patents under alternative examination rules. A stricter office narrows patents mostly because applicants request less scope and changes which inventions receive patents far less than an equally strict test of invention quality would.Censorship in Democracy (with Marcel Caesmann, and Matteo Grigoletto).
Abstract | Working Paper | VoxEU Column
Democracies increasingly use censorship to counter foreign propaganda, yet evidence on its consequences remains scarce. We exploit the European Union’s 2022 ban on Russia Today (RT) and Sputnik as a natural experiment, using a triple-difference design that compares users connected to the banned outlets against unconnected users in EU and non-EU countries. We analyze a daily panel of 677,780 tweets from 146,633 Twitter users in seven European countries. Pro-Russia output declines by 21.7% among connected EU users; in a difference-in-differences comparison with non-EU users, total pro-Russia output among EU users falls by 13.6%. Alternative suppliers do not fill the gap: neither their pro-Russia output nor the engagement they receive rises after the ban. Consistent with an agenda-setting role of the banned outlets, the share of EU users’ tweets covering the outlets’ daily top-five topics decreases by 17%. A survey experiment offers suggestive evidence that such censorship can come at a cost to the very norms it is meant to defend.Publications
The Rise of Health Economics: Transforming the Landscape of Economic Research (with Björn Hammarfelt, Martin Karlsson, and Mathias Kifmann). Health Economics