Maximilian Blesch

Welcome! My name is Maximilian Blesch, and I am a PhD candidate at the Berlin School of Economics under the supervision of Georg Weizsäcker and Peter Haan. I also work as a Research Associate at Humboldt University and the German Institute for Economic Research (DIW).

I focus on structural modeling in labor, public finance, and industrial organization. I make my research reusable by implementing and contributing to various software packages on GitHub.

In spring 2023, I visited Bertel Schjerning at the University of Copenhagen. In the fall of 2023 and spring of 2024,  I visited John Rust at Georgetown University.

CV: Here
Mail: maximilian.blesch@hu-berlin.de
Twitter/X: @MaxBlesch
GitHub: @MaxBlesch

 Working papers

Robust decision-making under risk and ambiguity
with Philipp Eisenhauer

Abstract: Economists often estimate economic models on data and use the point estimates as a stand-in for the truth when studying the model’s implications for optimal decision-making. This practice ignores model ambiguity, exposes the decision problem to misspecification, and ultimately leads to post-decision disappointment. Using statistical decision theory, we develop a framework to explore, evaluate, and optimize robust decision rules that explicitly account for estimation uncertainty. We show how to operationalize our analysis by studying robust decisions in a stochastic dynamic investment model in which a decision-maker directly accounts for uncertainty in the model’s transition dynamics.


Biased Wage Expectations and Female Labor Supply
with Philipp Eisenhauer, Peter Haan, Boryana Ilieva, Annekatrin Schrenker, Georg Weizsäcker

Abstract: We quantify the effects of biased wage expectations on female labor market outcomes. A wide sample of full-time and part-time employees report counterfactual predictions about their own wage trajectories in future full-time and part-time employment, revealing severe misperceptions. Actual wage growth occurs almost exclusively in full-time work, whereas it is close to zero in part-time work, as we show with reduced-form regressions and in a structural life-cycle model. Subjective expectations, however, predict a mild difference in the opposite direction, with strong over-optimism about the returns to part-time experience. We leverage the structural model to quantify how employee beliefs influence their labor supply, earnings and welfare over the life cycle. The bias increases part-time employment strongly, induces flatter long-run wage profiles, and substantially influences the employment effects of a widely discussed policy reform, the introduction of joint taxation. The most significant impact of the bias appears for college-educated women, consistent with the large difference between expected and realized wages observed for this group.