Constantin Bürgi

Constantin Bürgi is an Assistant Professor of Economics at St. Mary’s College of Maryland. His research focuses on Macroeconomic issues, especially on international finance and forecasting. He has published in peer reviewed journals, such as Economics Letters, and Empirical Economics, and presented his work at numerous conferences. He is also affiliated with the George Washington University Center for Economic Research.

In his publication on "Bias, Rationality and Asymmetric Loss Functions" he shows that to maintain the rationality assumption in face of the common finding that many individual forecasters are biased in surveys of professional forecasters, it is not necessary to impose asymmetric loss fuctions. Indeed, most of the apparent bias found empirically is simply due to forecasters not always contributing to the survey. This was demonstrated by imposing the missing observations pattern of individual forecasters on the simple average, which is unbiased overall, but becomes biased with the imposed missing observations.

He has teaching experience includes both courses taught for undergraduate and graduate students. He has taught both macro and micro principles classes, advanced field classes and supervised independent research papers by students. He is the owner of a YouTube Channel, where a selection of materials used in his teaching can be found.

At ifo/CES, Constantin will analyze the microdata of the World Economic Survey to test the efficiency of forecasts, if better forecasters can be identified to improve the prediction and compare them to consumer surveys.

Constantin received his PhD in Economics from the George Washington University. Prior to his doctoral work, Constantin worked for the Global Economics and Markets Research team at Goldman Sachs, London. He holds an MSc in Econometrics and Mathematical Economics from the London School of Economics and a B.A. in Economics from the University of St. Gallen, Switzerland.