The main criterion for awarding the prize is publications in internationally recognized journals. “Christian Bayer has made numerous significant contributions to the empirical analysis of macroeconomic impact mechanisms,” lauds VfS Chairman Prof. Georg Weizsäcker. Bayer’s contributions are consistently innovative, and in some (much-cited) cases can be categorized as basic methodological research.
Christian Bayer from the Institute of Macroeconomics and Econometrics and the Hausdorff Center for Mathematics Cluster of Excellence at the University of Bonn deals with models with heterogeneous agents. For example, different firms are affected very differently by macroeconomic shocks, which raises the empirically important question of their different responses to a shock. In several empirical papers, Christian Bayer, for example, demonstrates the widely dispersed response of entrepreneurial investment decisions.
Reactions to macroeconomic shocks
However, the study of heterogeneity in Christian Bayer's work also relates to household responses to economic shocks. For example, an incipient recession leads to noticeably higher income risks for households, which is why some households opt for more liquid financial portfolios out of caution. This can exacerbate a crisis, as the withdrawal of funds from illiquid forms of investment also lowers aggregate investment. Significant further aspects of household heterogeneity relate to the labor market: wage fluctuations, labor supply and migration decisions, for example, vary with some household characteristics, which is picked up in Christian Bayer's sophisticated empirical analyses.
“Macroeconomic shocks do not affect all market participants equally, nor do they act simultaneously. The analyses of models that include heterogeneous agents, developed by Christian Bayer and his co-authors, have significantly increased the understanding and quantification of the transmission of shocks,” emphasizes Weizsäcker.
About the person
Christian Bayer studied economics at the Universities of Bonn and Essen and received his doctorate in the same subject in Dortmund in 2004. After spending time abroad at the European University Institute in Florence, Bocconi University in Milan and Yale University in New Haven, he was appointed W3 professor at the University of Bonn in 2008, just four years after receiving his doctorate. His work has rightly been published in numerous leading journals and has been supported by two highly prominent 'grants' from the European Research Council, attesting to the high professional recognition Christian Bayer receives.
About the Hermann Heinrich Gossen Award
The prize is named after the Prussian lawyer Hermann Heinrich Gossen (1810 - 1858). With his work "The Development of the Laws of Human Intercourse, and the Rules for Human Action Flowing Therefrom," Gossen is considered one of the most important precursors of the modern marginal utility school.
