Julian Wichert

Julian Wichert

PhD Researcher

Leibniz University Hannover

Biography

Hi, I am a researcher and PhD student at the Leibniz University Hannover. I am an applied economist, my main fields are development economics, environmental economics and political economy. I work with large and unique datasets using up-to-date econometric methods to develop interesting insights that have important policy implications.

I visited UC San Diego for an academic research stay in 2021-22.

In 2024/25, I will be on the academic job market.

Interests
  • Development Economics
  • Environmental and Urban Economics
  • Geospatial, textual data
Education
  • PhD student/Researcher, since 2019

    Leibniz University Hannover

  • Visiting Researcher, 2021-2022

    UC San Diego

  • MSc Economics, 2016-2019

    LMU Munich

  • BA Philosophy & Economics, 2012-2016

    Bayreuth University

Current Research

The Effect of the 1930s Residential Security Maps on Environmental Disparities
The Effect of the 1930s Residential Security Maps on Environmental Disparities

Have discriminatory housing policies contributed to today’s pollution and climate hazard disparities? We examine the impact of Redlining during the 1930s in the US, which assigned risk grades to neighborhoods according to housing characteristics and ethnic composition, on spatial patterns of urban environmental disparities. An extensive literature on environmental justice documents strong correlations between a worse neighborhood risk grade and higher air pollution and climate risks today. However, whether these disparities have been caused by redlining or merely coincide with pre-existing discrimination is unclear. Our analysis exploits an exogenous city size cutoff i.e. only neighborhoods in cities above 40,000 residents received risk grades from HOLC. We compare areas that received a particular grade with neighborhoods that would have received the same grade if their city had been treated. The control neighborhoods are defined using a machine learning algorithm trained to classify HOLC-like grades using full-count census records. Using local measures of environmental hazards, we find that the disparities exhibit the same pattern in treated and comparison cities, with meagre differences across the same grade in treatment and control cities. Instead, our results suggest that sorting, and alternative forms of discrimination drive contemporary environmental and climate disparities.

Experience

 
 
 
 
 
Leibniz University Hannover
PhD Student/Researcher
July 2019 – Present Hannover, Germany

Institute of Macroeconomics

  • Co-Organization of two international conferences in Hannover: EPCS 2023, GDE 2024
  • Teaching in Growth and Development and Introduction to Macroeconomics
  • IT officer of the institute
 
 
 
 
 
UC San Diego
Visiting Researcher
August 2021 – February 2022 San Diego, US
Global School of Policy and Strategy, Jen Burney
 
 
 
 
 
ifo Institute
Research assistant
March 2018 – June 2019 Munich, Germany
  • Economics of Education Area
  • Energy, Climate and Resources Area

Contact

Feel free to contact me, I am looking forward to your message. You can also meet me this year at the following conferences:

  • EEA Rotterdam
  • German Development Economics Hannover
  • EAERE Leuven
  • Verein für Socialpolitik Berlin
  • Workshop on Causal Inference with Spatial Data Essen
  • BBQ Groningen