Assist. Prof. Gregor Pfeifer, Ph.D.

Risky Health Behaviors

While at CES, Gregor Pfeifer plans to work on several projects using administrative-level data to identify causal impacts of German policy interventions.

One project follows an existing research agenda on risky health behaviors, particularly with respect to youth smoking in Germany. In a previous paper, he and his collaborators showed that the introduction of a school smoking ban reduced both the propensity and intensity of smoking. In the intended follow-up project, they will use this smoking ban as an exogenous shock to study whether smoking impacts wages, and how potential effects differ by gender.

In another project, Mr. Pfeiffer and his collaborators intend to estimate early labor market returns to a STEM education for recent college graduates in Germany. They will estimate models allowing for heterogeneous returns to a STEM education based on unobserved tastes, as well as observable characteristics such as, e.g., gender.

Mr. Pfeifer is an Applied Microeconomist with a research focus on Health, Education, and Public Economics, and a particular interest in the toolkit of Applied Microeconometrics and its application to Policy Evaluations.

Gregor Pfeifer is Senior Lecturer (tenured) at the University of Sydney, School of Economics. Before joining the University of Sydney, he held a position as Senior Research Officer in the Department of Economics at University College London, Centre for Research and Analysis of Migration (CReAM). Mr. Pfeifer holds a PhD in Economics as well as a Diploma in Business Administration from Saarland University and a Master of Business Administration (MBA) from Colorado State University.