Dr Tim Obermeier

I’m a Lecturer (Assistant Professor) in Economics at the University of Leicester. I’m also a Research Associate at the Institute for Fiscal Studies and an Associate at the Centre for Economic Performance. I obtained my Ph.D. from the University of Mannheim.

My research is in macroeconomics and labour economics, with a focus on inequality and the role of tax, transfer and social insurance policy. I study how family decisions, labour market frictions and firm behaviour shape the distribution of income and broader measures of well-being, and how government policy can influence these outcomes.

For more information, please visit my personal website: https://sites.google.com/view/timobermeier/home

My research is in macroeconomics and labour economics and focuses on inequality and the role of government policy in modern labour markets.

A first strand studies family and macro questions, analysing how partnering, fertility, labour supply and the sharing of resources within households feed into aggregate inequality over the life cycle and across generations, and how tax and transfer systems interact with these decisions.

A second strand focuses on tax, transfer and social insurance policy. Here I investigate how policies such as unemployment insurance and taxation redistribute income, insure households against labour market and family shocks, and affect behaviour. This includes studying how firms’ screening and hiring decisions interact with the design of social insurance, and what this implies for the trade-off between providing insurance and preserving search incentives.

A third strand examines firms and inequality, focusing on how differences across firms – for instance, in productivity – translate into disparities in wages or career progression across workers.

I am happy to supervise PhD students in areas broadly related to macroeconomics, labour economics and gender/family economics. Possible topics include, for example:

• Quantitative macroeconomics: search-and-matching models of the labour market; life-cycle models; macroeconomic models of tax and transfer policy; models of family decisions in a macroeconomic context
• Labour and family economics: empirical analysis of microdata on labour markets, inequality and income risk; family formation, fertility and intra-household decision-making; gender gaps in occupations, wages and careers

If you are interested in pursuing a PhD in these areas, please feel free to contact me so we can discuss potential topics.

At the University of Leicester, I've been involved in teaching:

EC7063: Big Data Communication and Visualisation
EC2051: Money and Central Banking
EC2046: Intermediate Macroeconomics

• Ph.D. in Economics, University of Mannheim, 2019
• M.Sc. in Economics, University of Mannheim, 2015
• B.Sc. in Economics with Mathematics, University of Mannheim, 2013