Two PhD student positions

at  Universit de Lausanne

INTRODUCTION

UNIL is a leading international teaching and research institution, with over 5,000 employees and 17,000 students split between its Dorigny campus, CHUV and Epalinges. As an employer, UNIL encourages excellence, individual recognition and responsibility.

YOUR QUALIFICATIONS

• Master’s degree in economics (or equivalent qualification conditional on Bachelor in economics)
• Excellent skills in data analysis, statistical/ econometric methods, and programming
• Fluency in English (written and spoken) is required. Proficiency in French and/or German is an asset
• Innovative, accurate, reliable, and persistent

State capacity, measured as the ability of a state efficiently provide public services to its citizens, is arguably essential to produce and attract human capital and, hence, to generate economic growth. Since their establishment in the mid-19th century, postal services have likely represented one of the earliest forms of major public infrastructure in Western societies, providing a variety of services promoting the spread of ideas and social capital in addition to the expansion of the financial sector via a reduction in communication costs.
Our project aims to explore the long-term effects of the development of postal services since 1850 on the local socio-economic development of Swiss municipalities. To do so, we structure our research into four sub-projects aiming to empirically quantify the impact of the historical expansion of the presence and quality of postal services on i) population dynamics, ii) the rise of the banking and insurance sector, iii) local real estate development, and iv) individuals’ attitudes toward state capacity and central government’s voting recommendations.
The research approach that we use to investigate the implications of the development of postal services is quantitative and relies on the use of modern econometric techniques to isolate the causal effects of postal services. An important first step in the realization of the project is the data preparation. We plan to create a novel dataset on postal services by digitalizing the information contained in the archives of the Swiss post in paper format. Such information is currently unexploited by academicians.