Contact
Biography
Markus joined the School of Economics in September 2011 as a Lecturer (Assistant Professor) in Economics and was promoted to Associate Professor in 2017. Prior to coming to Nottingham he held an ESRC post-doctoral research fellowship at the Centre for the Study of African Economies in the Department of Economics at Oxford, where he also completed his Masters and DPhil. His first degree was in Modern Chinese Studies and he has spent over three years studying and conducting research in China.
Current working papers are listed among publications below and together with research in progress can be viewed on Markus' personal website: https://sites.google.com/site/medevecon
Markus' Facewall page. His complete cv can be downloaded from here in pdf format.
Teaching Summary
During the academic year 2024/25 Markus teaches the dissertation lectures for the final year undergraduates (Semester 1) and acts as convenor for this module. He also supervises dissertations for UG… read more
Research Summary
Markus' research is focused on the following areas: first, productivity analysis at the macro level, where he recently completed a project entitled 'Knowledge Accumulation and Diffusion: Analysing… read more
Current Research
Markus' research is focused on the following areas: first, productivity analysis at the macro level, where he recently completed a project entitled 'Knowledge Accumulation and Diffusion: Analysing Heterogeneity in an Interconnected World,' funded by the ESRC (UK Economic and Social Research Council). Recent work on 'absorptive capacity' with collaborators from Ghent University is published in the Journal of International Economics (2020). A second area relates to the analysis of financial crises since the 19th century and in the past forty years: completed papers on banking crises in low income countries here, published in the Journal of International Economics (2021), and on sovereign default here. Related work looks at the 'too much finance' debate, also from a financial vulnerability angle. Third, research on the question of the economic 'dividend' of democratic regime change, available here, here (published in the Review of Economics and Statistics) and here (published in the European Economic Review). He recently secured a Leverhulme Research Fellowship (2025-26) investigating 'democracy and geography'. Many of the papers in these three strands of research adopt novel panel econometric methods to deal with concerns over identification/causality. Finally, and most recently, with colleagues at Nottingham he investigates gender differences in the academic job market using textual data from over 12,000 reference letters (see here for a paper published in the Economic Journal) as well as experimental interventions (ongoing research).
All ongoing and published research can be viewed on his personal website.
Markus is a Research Fellow (since 2024) at the Centre for Economic Policy Research (CEPR) in the Macro and Growth group. At Nottingham he is an internal research fellow in the Centre for Finance, Credit and Macroeconomics (CFCM), the Centre for Research in Economic Development and Trade (CREDIT), the Centre for Research on Globalisation and Economic Policy (GEP) and Nottingham Interdisciplinary Centre for Economic and Political Research (NICEP). He has acted as a peer reviewer for grant applications to the ESRC, the Canadian SSHRC and the Swiss National Science Foundation, among others, and has sat on commissioning panels for DfID-ESRC and ESRC funding calls. He is an Associate Editor for Empirical Economics (since 2018) and International Economics (since 2020) and is an external examiner for the MSc programmes at City, University of London.