Associate Dean (Research and Knowledge Exchange)

Why did you become a researcher?

For Germans of my generation, the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 was the most important historical event in our lifetimes.  For me, it was also the reason why I became interested in research.

Over a few months, Germany witnessed the collapse of the communist regime, and East Germans achieved representation in political decision making, freedom to travel and new economic opportunity, to mention a few key achievements.  However, millions of people also lost their jobs after East German businesses did not survive in the market economy.  Being an undergraduate student at the time, I became interested in the mechanisms causing economic change and how government policy can support people managing breaks in their biographies resulting from it. 

This led to a deep interest in analysing microdata to understand the enablers and confounders for positive biographical transitions, and whether policy interventions – such as training for job seekers – have a causal effect on improving people’s lives.  My interest coincided with an increase in data availability (and theory, methods and computing power in the social sciences) since the 1990s, and continues to be my main research interest.

Describe a typical day at work.

Most of my days are now spent on management tasks, often research related like writing project proposals, organising seminars and events, implementing/monitoring the school research plan, etc.  However, I still have a day per week for my research, i.e. reading/writing and empirical work. The most enjoyable activity is programming R to learn from the data and to find out about the relationships I’m interested in.

Who has influenced you most in your career so far and how?

I worked as a part-time student assistant at WZB, the Berlin Social Science Center, from 1994.  It was an incredibly exciting place full with leading researchers working on democracy, the future of capitalism, environmental sustainability, and how to create more inclusive societies with better education and labour market policies.  Prof. Guenther Schmid was the inspiring leader of our research unit, supporting us as a team to create impactful research.  He continues to be an inspiration for me as well as my Ph.D. supervisor, Prof. Bernd Fitzenberger.

What is the greatest challenge you have ever undertaken?

Probably the Ph.D.  It’s always a challenge, but for me as a political science graduate aiming for an economics Ph.D., it was also about joining a new community and contributing the teaching and research at Germany’s best department at the time, Mannheim.  A challenging, but very positive time.

What is your greatest achievement?

Consequentially the Ph.D.

If you could invite three people to dinner (past or present), who would they be?

Hannah Arendt, Paul Lazarsfeld or John Maynard Keynes were leading researchers around work and the need for institutions and the state to improve people’s lives.  It would be interesting to know what they would have to say today.

What’s the best bit of advice you’ve ever received (work or personal)?

Just keep going.

What would be the research project you’d most like to work on?

I would really love to do research around innovative programmes for disadvantaged young people to help them get good jobs and long-term careers in booming sectors like IT.  Ideally, a random control trial of different options, and a lot of data to understand what works.

My current research: “Digital Skills”

I’m currently finishing work on the importance of digital skills for individual earnings and employment in jobs with mid-level skills, which are very often jobs people go into through apprenticeships. Related job roles cover a wide spectrum of technical, administrative, skilled manufacturing and trades, service and care occupations, which are all qualified jobs, but below degree level.  The main section of the report describes the digital skills involved in these occupations systematically and provides estimates of the earnings differentials associated with them. 

The research follows basic assumptions of the (microeconomics) human capital model and makes use of new data obtained from online vacancies for apprenticeships (https://www.gov.uk/apply-apprenticeship). Given the very large size of the data – based on our Freedom Of Information Act (FOIA) request, we obtained data for more than 433,000 vacancies from 300,000+ job ads – we can explore digital skills involved in apprenticeship jobs in more detail than previous studies.  The data are also relatively recent, showing the situation after the Covid-19 pandemic, which introduced the much wider use of remote working practices among white collar workers, often involving digital environments. 

Our empirical results find positive associations between digital skills and wages in occupations requiring mid-range qualifications, but not in the highly skilled jobs.  A disaggregated analysis of specific skills shows that these results are driven by relatively advanced skills, while mentioning explicitly lower-level digital skills like Microsoft Office, computers, email and social media show in several specifications negative associations with observed wages. 

In our view, the absence of significant estimates of digital skills in the higher-level occupations shows the endogeneity of such skills in job roles.  Lower-level jobs are affected positively, but only by relatively more advanced digital skills.  For the further development of apprenticeships standards in the UK, our results suggest that digital skills should extend beyond the currently included Functional Skills into the advanced skills as these would prepare apprenticeships for higher paid jobs.