Business Administration and Economics
Economics
The Chair of Econometrics (Prof. Christoph Hanck) develops suitable methods for empirical economics research, with an emphasis on statistical hypothesis tests. Recent work has focused on inferential tools for time series data. Particular challenges in this area are associated with non-stationary data, which exhibit no tendency to revert to some mean in the long term. More concretely, current work concerns tests that are also valid when analysing several dependent time series whose variances are allowed to change over time. This is relevant when studying whether positive or negative shocks affect gross domestic product over time and if so, how permanently. Another set of projects deals with multiple testing procedures. These methods tackle the so-called multiplicity problem, i.e., the problem frequently arising in applied work that a certain statistical hypothesis is tested many times. If there is no control for multiplicity, the evidence against the null hypothesis will be overestimated, since the data have many opportunities heuristically to produce type I errors. This constellation is often found empirically, for example when working with multi-country data (panel data).
Research at the Chair of Health Economics deals with empirical analysis of health as a key factor of social and economic well-being. Under the leadership of Prof. Martin Karlsson, the research group analyses the effects of various public interventions in health and education, including preventive screening and examinations, which can improve population health in the long term and potentially reduce socioeconomic inequality in healthcare. The complex relationship between socioeconomic factors and individual health that exists here can sometimes span decades and generations. Identification of causal relationships between determinants and health outcomes thus requires state-of-the-art econometric methods. A credible empirical analysis also requires solid official data, and for this reason the Chair is in the process of collecting and digitising large historical data sets in current projects.
Various projects in collaboration with researchers from Lund, Essex, Zurich and North America are examining topics such as the economic cost of infectious disease and to what extent environmental factors during pregnancy and early childhood have an effect in later life. In other collaborations with partners in London, Oslo and Ithaca (USA), the group is also researching information asymmetry in the private health insurance market, as well as the ageing population and care of the elderly.