Christian Düben

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.

As a postdoctoral research fellow at Monash University's SoDa Laboratories, I am part of that team's effort to explore unconventional data sources for economic research. Prior to this role, I held research and teaching positions at various German universities and one institute.

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 a previous 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, CRAN: 04/2024). To make R more versatile, my cppcontainers R package (GitHub: 10/2024, CRAN: 11/2024) lets users handle C++ Standard Template Library containers similar to native R objects. 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.

In 2025, I launched a blog discussing policy questions from multiple perspectives and explaining economic considerations in simple language.