Christian Düben

Doctoral Candidate

Economics Department

Hamburg University

I am an economist conducting research at the intersection of economic geography, urban economics, and economic history. Many of my projects explore the evolution of the world’s urban landscape. I investigate the determinants that shape it in the long run and the consequences resulting from it today. My research builds on geo-spatial data and leverages insights from non-economic disciplines, such as remote sensing, geography, machine learning, graph theory, and history. The papers I write outside my core specialization, e.g. in international trade or scientometrics, are often an application of these methods to a different domain.

After bachelor's and master's studies with a focus on applied microeconometrics in Mainz, I joined the Chair of Macroeconomics at Hamburg University in September 2017 for a doctorate. My employment was funded by Shining (New) Light on Regional Inequality, Convergence and Development, a research project organized by development economists from Brunswick, Hamburg, and Hanover. Since then, my coauthor and supervisor Melanie Krause and I have closely collaborated on various urban economics papers. With the project's funding running out, I took up another position at the Chair of Political Economy and Empirical Economics at Helmut Schmidt University in May 2021. Through a cooperation agreement between the university and the Hamburg Institute of International Economics, I assumed a secondary role and supported the institute as deputy head of the methods center between April 2022 and June 2023. Expected to submit my dissertation soon, I will be on the 2023/ 2024 international job market. During my job market year, I will be working with Richard Bluhm at the University of Stuttgart.

My passion for programming regularly leads to new scientific software and web development projects. They are commonly related to one of my articles, but extend beyond that. I developed the current version of CollEc, a RePEc service allowing users to explore the coauthorship network in economics. Working on a revision of a paper of mine, I published the conleyreg R package on Conley Standard Errors (GitHub: 04/2021, CRAN: 05/2021). Requiring a much more powerful package on shortest paths computations than was available, I built the spaths R package for my research on North Atlantic iceberg drift (GitHub: 08/2022). At Helmut Schmidt University, I developed LearnEconometrics, a teaching platform on which students answer tutorial questions in course-specific apps. My empirical papers' code is largely written in R and C++, with the occasional Python and Julia script. Feel free to contact me, if you would like to collaborate on a project.