About me

I am a research fellow (Assegnista di Ricerca) in Economics at the University of Bologna under the supervision of Matteo Cervellati. I recently returned from a period as Visiting Research Fellow at Brown University, Providence (RI). I defended my PhD thesis (after 4 years) in autumn 2019 [Thesis committe: Klaus Desmet (SMU), David N. Weil (Brown)].

My thesis - broadly speaking - analyses the impact and features of the increasing worldwide spatial interconnectedness through the lens of (economic) history, focussing on India and Europe. By combining economic theory [a Quantitative Spatial model of pre-industrial Europe (Ch2), a Malthusian model with outmigration (Ch3)], econometrics [including a technical note on spatialRDDs combined with an R package (Ch1)], and different tools from GI science, I aim to contribute to the age-old question of “Why are some countries rich and others not?”. The most fascinating and exciting unresolved issue in all of economics to me.
These works on the intersection of Spatial Economics and Economic Development, touching upon urbanisation/agglomeration, migration, fertility, and the roots of gender inequality, are intended to open up my future research agenda.

More recently I began to work on (spatial) statistical problems that arise from the usage of highly disaggregated data with a geographic component (read: virutally any data) with large numbers of observations.

Currently I am the holder of the biennial Young Researcher Award of the Regional Science Association International (RSAI). Here you can find a copy of my CV.

• [2019-4] NOeG, Graz
• [2019-8] EEA, Manchester
• [2019-8] EHES, Paris
• [2019-9] Long-run Development Workshop, Bologna (Keynotes: Mokyr, Voth)
• [2020-5] Brown Growth Conference
• [2020-6] RSAI 2020, Marrakesh

Don’t let yourself fool by maps & their projection system about

• the actual size of countries (I),
• the actual size of countries (II),
• distances and straight lines.
  

Things that (supposedly) make me more productive

• Sublime, a truly sublime texteditor
• Within R: (recently all these packages were merged together with others by R-god Hadley Wickham into the metapackage tidyverse)
  • dplyr (the next (last?) iteration of ‘plyr’, the most powerful data wrangling package on earth; across all platforms)
  • tidyr (the evolution of ‘reshape2’, powerful in changing the layout of data - e.g. cross-section to panel and vice-versa)
  • magrittr (a pipe operator that makes code nicer)
• Gummi, a slim TeX-editor with live update

Some random stats links

• P-value hacking, Nate Silver
• Magnificent visual intro to Machine Learning (so far only fitting Trees)
• Seeing Theory (a brilliant visual intro to statistical concepts by Brown’s Daniel Kunin)
• Univariate Distribution Relationships
• Visual Laboratories in Probability & Statistics (inter alia, nice visualisations & simulations of probabilistic concepts)

Linux related stuff that makes/made my life easier

• Linux Jouney (everything you always wanted to know)
• The Unix Workbench (command line tutorial, including an intro to Git)

Currently I am working on an R-package to implement mutliple Spatial-, or Geographic Regression Discontinuity Design estimation strategies.
It is called SpatialRDD and a development version is available on Github.

A.A. 2018/19

• GIS Tools Laboratory [Graduate - LMEC]
• Advanced GIS Analyis [PhD Course]

A.A. 2016/17

• Macroeconomics 1 [Growth Theory, Graduate - LMEC]
• Macroeconomics [Undergraduate - CLEF]

• alexander.lehner[ät]unibo.it
• Piazza Scaravilli 2, Ufficio 173, 40126 Bologna
• write email for appointment