Assist. Prof. Carlo Rasmus Schwarz, Ph.D.

“Climbing the Ivory Tower: How Socio-Economic Background Shapes Academia”

In this study Carlo Schwarz and his project members examine the increasing concerns about the under-representation of individuals from low socioeconomic backgrounds in important societal institutions such as governments, leadership positions in the private sector, and academia. In the context of academia, the under-representation of lower-SES individuals makes research narrower and ultimately hinders the creation of new knowledge. In other words, that the “missing people”' that this under-representation entails translates into “missing ideas”. In this project, the researchers investigate this question by leveraging the largest dataset on the socioeconomic backgrounds and research output of US academics that was ever assembled. With these data, the researchers are able to measure the socioeconomic backgrounds and research output tens of thousands of academics in hundreds of universities spanning more than five decades.

Mr. Schwarz’s research interest lies in the field of applied microeconomics with a particular interest in policy-relevant questions. In his research, he combines causal inference strategies with techniques from text analysis, machine learning, and data science. His recent research investigates the contributed of social media to the spread of hate crimes and anti-minority sentiments online and offline as well as polarization and election outcomes
Carlo Schwarz is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Economics of Bocconi University. He was a Visiting Assistant Professor at Stanford University at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research (SIEPR). He is an Affiliate of the Institute for European Policymaking as well as a CEPR Research Affiliate. He holds a PhD and an MRes in Economics from the University of Warwick and a BSc in Economics from the University of Mannheim.