I am a research fellow in economics at the University of Bologna. I defended my PhD thesis (after 4 years) in autumn 2019 [external committee: Klaus Desmet (SMU), David N. Weil (Brown)].

My thesis analyzes certain impacts and features of the increasing worldwide spatial interconnectedness through the lens of (economic) history. The focus lies on India and Europe. Broadly speaking, in my research 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.
I see my future research agenda on the intersection of spatial economics and economic development, touching upon urbanization/agglomeration, migration, fertility, and the roots of gender inequality.

After a visiting period at Brown in 2018, I will be visiting the Spatial Center at the University of Chicago in fall 2021. In 2018 I won the biennial Young Researcher Award of the Regional Science Association International (RSAI). Here you can find a copy of my CV.

• CAGE Summer School, Warwick (July 2021)

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. 2020/21

• Microeconomics (see blackboard) [Johns Hopkins SAIS]

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