Sascha O. Becker

Protestantism and Suicide

Sascha O. Becker will work with Ludger Woessmann on Protestantism and suicide, studying empirically one of the most well-known links in the social sciences, first reported by Emile Durkheim more than a century ago. Their project will involve the use of Prussian county-level census data from the 19th century. The researchers have already presented some of their findings on Protestantism and suicide propensity in CESifo Working Paper 5288.

Sascha Becker’s research focus is on labour and demographic economics. His research has appeared in international journals, including the Quarterly Journal of Economics and the American Economic Review. He has also authored numerous CESifo Working Papers.

Sascha Becker is Professor of Economics in the Department of Economics of the University of Warwick where he is also Deputy Director of the Centre for Competitive Advantage in the Global Economy (CAGE). Previously, he held positions at the LMU and at the University of Stirling, Scotland. He serves as ifo Research Professor for the ifo Center for the Economics of Education and is a CESifo Research Network Fellow as well as an IZA Research Fellow. He studied Economics at the University of Bonn and at the Ecole Nationale de la Statistique et de l'Administration Economique (ENSAE) in Paris. He obtained his PhD from the European University Institute (EUI) in Florence. His Habilitation and venia legendi in Economics are from the LMU. He was a visiting scholar at the Center for Labor Economics at the University of California Berkeley, at the University of California in San Diego at the UCLA Anderson School of Management.