Simon Hess (Goethe University Frankfurt)
Simon Heß is joining us from the Goethe University of Frankfurt where obtained his PhD, supervised by Matthias Schündeln. Simon Heß is an applied microeconomist, mainly interested in development economics. He works on causal inference in the context of development policy evaluations and studies how poor households share risk and cooperate in general in social and economic networks. For his research he combines field work (mostly in West Africa), micro theory, and econometric methods for causal inference.
Simon enjoys interacting with his colleagues in seminars but also in coffee breaks and is looking forward to getting to know everyone at the department better. In his spare time he enjoys road biking and running. Simon lived in Vienna as a child but left the city 20 years ago. He is now looking forward to coming back to rediscover the city.
Michael Pfarrhofer (University of Salzburg)
Michael received his PhD from WU Vienna on high-dimensional time series analysis in 2019 and has been a post-doc at the University of Salzburg since. During this time, he was also a visiting researcher at Bocconi University, and consulted the European Commission’s JRC Ispra, the Oesterreichische Nationalbank (OeNB) and the International Institute of Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA).
His research interests include macroeconomics and econometric methods for dynamic models. In particular, he’s interested in monetary economics, business cycles and predictive inference. The focus of his work is also on parametric and nonparametric econometrics, machine learning techniques and Bayesian data analysis. His papers have been published in the Journal of Econometrics, the International Economic Review, the Journal of Applied Econometrics, the Scandinavian Journal of Economics and the Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization, among others.
In his free time, Michael listens to rock ’n’ roll music and history podcasts, likes extensive barbecuing, appreciates the occasional hike and enjoys Formula 1 races on Sunday afternoon.
