Daniel Schmidt wins best PhD paper award at the 6th Baltic Economic Conference
Daniel Schmidt (University of Amsterdam) wins best PhD paper award at the 6th Baltic Economic Conference, organized by the Baltic Economic Association. The Baltic Economic Conference is the annual conference, rotating every year within the three Baltic countries.
This year the conference took place in Tallin, Estonia, organized by the Baltic Economic Association, in cooperation with the Bank of Estonia, Tallin University of Technology and Estonian Business School. The conference program included almost 50 papers, and a keynote delivered by Gianmarco Ottaviano (Bocconi University, Italy).
The conference builds upon the annual meeting of the Lithuanian Economics Network, started in 2012. From 2021, the Baltic Economic Association organizes a competition for the best paper presented by a PhD student at the Baltic Economic Conference. The candidates for the award are not limited to the Baltic region (neither in terms of institution nor nationality).
This year's best paper has been decided by the jury, consisting of representatives from the Bank of Estonia and the Bank of Latvia. It was unanimously awarded to Daniel Schmidt for his paper “Retirement and the marginal propensity to consume: Theory and evidence”. The paper studies how flexible retirement affects the marginal propensity to consume out of a windfall gain. Using data from the Survey of Consumer Expectations, Daniel finds that the MPC of workers is about 20% lower than the MPC of retirees, even when controlling for age and other individual characteristics. Using both a stylized model and a quantitative life-cycle model, he demonstrates that endogenous retirement can explain this difference in MPCs: Older workers use a part of the windfall to finance early retirement which decreases their consumption response compared to retirees.
Daniel Schmidt is a PhD candidate in Economics at the University of Amsterdam under supervision of research fellows Marcelo Pedroni and Roel Beetsma. His main research area is macroeconomics with household heterogeneity. He is also interested in housing markets, public finance, and household finance. Daniel graduated from Tinbergen Institute’s research master in 2020 and currently works as a PhD trainee at the European Central Bank.