Kilian Huber

The economic costs of a discriminatory ideology

In a recent paper (with Volker Lindenthal and Fabian Waldinger), Kilian Huber has examined how the surge in anti-Semitism after the Nazis came to power affected German firms. The paper documents that senior Jewish managers left their firms after 1933. Results show that firm stock prices, dividend payments, and returns on assets of affected firms decreased. A back-of-the-envelope calculation suggests that the aggregate market valuation of firms listed in Berlin fell by 1.8 percent of German GNP. The findings imply that discrimination can lead to persistent and first-order economic losses.

Kilian Huber’s research studies the interaction between the financial sector and the real economy. In previous work, he has used empirical methods to explore how financial crises affect growth, how household borrowing responds to changes in house prices, and how changes in the size of banks affect the real economy.

Kilian Huber is Assistant Professor of Economics at the Booth School of Business of the University of Chicago. In 2018/19, he was the inaugural Saieh Family Fellow in Macroeconomics at the Becker Friedman Institute of the University of Chicago. Mr. Kilian is also an Associate of the Centre for Economic Performance. He holds a PhD in Economics from the London School of Economics. His research has been published in the American Economic Review.