News

Started my new job as a postdoctoral research associate at Caltech.

California Institute of Technology

August 2026

Update: "Immigration and Nationalism in the Long Run"

Conditionally accepted at the JEEA

June 2026

Excited to be involved in developing a "remote sensing time machine" to study environmental change since the 1940s.

Aerial History Project - Global Policy Lab

Spring 2026

SNIS International Geneva Award for RESTAT publication "Disastrous Discretion"

Swiss Network for International Studies

February 2026

Dr. Stephan A. Schneider
Postdoctoral Research Associate, California Institute of Technology

Before joining Caltech, I was a postdoctoral researcher at Stanford University, IIES – Stockholm University, and ETH Zurich, where I received my PhD in 2024. I am a CESifo Research Network Affiliate, a KOF Research Fellow (ETH Zurich), and a former Postdoc.mobility scholar funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation.

I am an economist by training, and one core of my research is political and environmental economics. In particular, I am interested in explaining how individuals and societies make decisions in response to changing environments and unexpected situations. I develop empirical analyses focusing on causal relationships, often employing quasi-experiments derived from historical and natural events.

Alongside this, a growing part of my work centers on large-scale analyses in the environmental social sciences, which I pursue within team-based international collaborations. This line of research integrates spatial data analysis and interdisciplinary knowledge with the toolkit of applied economics to answer long-standing questions of global significance. These questions concern real-world challenges such as the allocation of scarce resources, environmental protection, natural disaster management, land use, and renewable energy, as well as societal issues such as migration and political polarization.

I have published in leading journals such as The Review of Economics and Statistics, the American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, and the Journal of Public Economics.

What motivates me is to help understand this interesting world just a little more.

In the big picture

Research
Snapshots

My recent and current projects contribute to explaining…

political favoritism and biased decision-making.
the rise of separatist and nationalist parties.
interactions of natural events, politics, and economics.

As a sports fan, in which situations would you be most afraid of a biased referee? Probably when it’s neck and neck and the right decision is not obvious.
There is an analogy with political decision-making. In Disastrous Discretion, we show that political favoritism in disaster relief provision is prevalent in ambiguous situations. Medium disaster intensities provide the best opportunities for politicians to exert biased allocations – the fairness of their decisions is less obvious for the public to judge than for very strong or very weak disaster impact.

„Vertriebene Sudetendeutsche warten mit Handgepäck auf ihren Abtransport“ (upper picture) by Sudetendeutsche Stiftung is licensed under CC BY-SA 1.0. „Refugees crossing into Poland, 7 March 2022“ (lower picture) from the website or social media of the Ministry of Internal Affairs of Ukraine is licensed under CC BY 4.0.

Displacement and immigration have immediate consequences for societies and can shake up the political landscape. But do we still see traces of that generations later? In a current project, we use a quasi-experiment from Germany to examine how past and present interact.