Biography

For a few years now I have been working as an assistant professor of economics at the Institute for Advanced Studies (IHS) in Vienna, Austria. My research is mostly in macroeconomics (both theoretical and applied) and in financial economics.

I obtained my education in economics as an undergraduate at the University of Vienna and then in the Ph.D. programme at the EUI in Florence. My thesis was supervised by Roger Farmer (now at UCLA), who introduced me to the fascinating topic of self-fulfilling beliefs in macroeconomics, which then became the focus of my research for a couple of years.

This work also furthered my interest in properties of realistically calibrated versions of such models and the comparison to real economies. In the same spirit, much of my recent research is guided by the principle of what one may call quantitative theory, i.e., developing theoretical models that allow for the quantitative study of substantive macroeconomic questions.

Currently, I am working on macroeconomic problems that call for applications of dynamic portfolio choice theory. In many cases this is due to frictions in financial markets, like collateral constraints for borrowing. For instance, I study how decisions to accumulate durable goods like housing depend on idiosyncratic income uncertainty faced by individuals. In this type of models portfolio choice decisions interact with a competitive financial sector to pin down equilibrium prices of assets like interest rates on secured and unsecured credit.