Brian Jagusch
Fourth year PhD student
- Supervisors: Andreas Steinhauer & Steven Dieterle
- Start date: 01-Oct-2019
- School of Economics
Contact details
- Email: brian.jagusch@ed.ac.uk
Address
- Street
-
31 Buccleuch Place
Room 3.11 - City
- Edinburgh
- Post code
- EH8 9JT
Background
I am an economist and a Doctoral Researcher in the final stages of completing my PhD in Economics by the end of 2023. I greatly enjoy telling stories with data and finding innovative answers to complex questions.
After finishing my PhD, I am going to work in the private sector as an Economic Consultant starting in March 2024.
My research focuses on public finance and labour market interventions, where I use state-of-the-art methods of causal inference, which I find fascinating and enjoy exploring in-depth. My preferred tool for data analysis is Stata, and I have used R for Causal Inference Machine Learning. In business, I have used my knowledge to inform analysis on cartel damage estimation in an EU cartel case and contributed to a comprehensive European gas market model for a Cost-Benefit Analysis of a gas market merger.
I have led large groups of students as a tutor for statistics and econometrics courses. As a tutor, I received nominations for Student Teacher of the Year two years in a row. Recently, I have been acting as a Lab Lead, leading a small team of lab instructors.
In the PhD program, I have initiated a series of peer events to facilitate the exchange between cohorts after the pandemic. Also, I am currently designing a workflow process for a larger project digitising parish books in Austria for statistical analysis using Python.
Qualifications
The University of Edinburgh, School of Economics
Master of Science in Economics , graduated with Distinction, top 10% of class – August 2019
University of Münster, School of Business and Economics
Bachelor of Science in Economics, ranked 2/26 of class – March 2018
Awarded German Academic Scholarship Foundation scholarship (awarded to 1 in 200 students)
Responsibilities & affiliations
SGPE affiliate
Undergraduate teaching
Applications of Econometrics (Tutor: 2020/2021, 2021/2022; Lab Lead: 2022/2023)
Essentials of Econometrics (2021/2022)
Statistical Methods for Economics (2020/2021, 2022/2023)
Economics 2 (2019/2020)
Research summary
- Applied Microeconometrics, especially Difference-in-Differences Methods
- Labour Economics
- Public Policy
Project activity
The Effect of Compressed Schooling on Early Career Outcomes
Abstract: I use administrative labour market data to estimate the effect of compressing instructional time in school on labour market outcomes of young adults. Leveraging the staggered introduction of the so-called "G8" reform, I compare students on the German academic school track who graduated under a compressed curriculum to those who did not. Using a robust difference-in-differences strategy, I find that the reform reduced labour market earnings by about 14% over the sample mean six years after graduating from high school. The decline is persistent and primarily driven by changes to the curriculum inducing higher weekly workloads, while age effects play a minor role. A range of alternative specifications and placebo tests confirm my main findings.
Income Taxes and the Timing of Marital Dissolution: Evidence from Germany
Abstract: I use German survey data to investigate whether married couples shift the timing of martial break-up to reduce income tax liabilities. In Germany, married couples are eligible for income tax rebates if they are married for at least one day in the calendar year, which creates an incentive to delay the break-up date into the next calendar year. I show that a large proportion of married couples report a break-up in the first quarter of a year, especially in January, between 1984 and 2017. I find that a 1,000 EUR increase in the tax rebate is associated with an increase in the probability of a break-up occurring in the first quarter by 2.9 percentage points, which is consistent with spouses postponing their separation date in response to tax deductions. I find no differences in the probability of divorce regardless of the timing of the break-up.
Who cares? The Role of Childcare in Reducing Labour Market Inequalities
Abstract: Most remaining inequality in the labour market between men and women is driven by the unequal effects of childbirth on mothers and fathers. Increasing childcare provision has been a widely used policy tool to ease the gap in earnings and employment across countries. Using administrative data on German mothers linked with local childcare data, I estimate the effect of local childcare expansions on inequality due to childbirth. I find that childcare has no detectable effect on mothers' labour market outcomes in the short or long run. Allowing for different effects in the more gender-egalitarian east and the gender-conservative west does not change the result. The null effect is driven by mothers not substituting maternal care for formal childcare. Also, satisfaction with childcare does not change with the level of childcare provided, hinting at high costs of reentering the labour market.
Frontier Economics Ltd, PhD Intern, London/Cologne, UK/Germany, May 2021 – Aug 2021
UniCredit Bank AG, Wealth Management Intern, Düsseldorf, Germany, Mar 2018 – Aug 2018
Linde plc, Global Pensions Working Student, Munich, Germany, Oct 2014 – Feb 2016
Check out my LinkedIn profile for more details about my industry experience:
- Research and Teaching PhD Scholarship (since 2023)
- Nomination: Student Teacher of the Year (2022, 2023)
- Principal’s Career Development PhD Scholarship (2019–2022)
- 2nd Best Graduation Result, University of Münster (2018)
- Scholar of the German Academic Scholarship Foundation (2014–2017)