NOeG Dissertation Scholarship for Atanas Pekanov

The dissertation fellowship, which the Austrian National Economic Society (NOeG) awards annually to two doctoral students at Austrian universities in the amount of 4,000 euro each, is intended to support their work on the dissertation, for example by financing research stays at universities abroad or conference presentations.

Atanas Pekanov studied economics at the Vienna University of Economics and Business (WU Vienna) and at the University College London. Since 2017 he is a PhD student at WU Vienna. Since the beginning of 2017 he has been working as a researcher at WIFO in the field of macroeconomics and European economic policy.

Atanas Pekanov received the fellowship to promote his ongoing research work on heterogeneity in macroeconomics and heterogeneous agents New Keynesian DSGE models. This emerging framework uses detailed microdata on household inequality of income and wealth and on the heterogeneity of consumption responses, embedding it in current state-of-the-art models to better represent macroeconomic aggregates and the dynamics following macroeconomic shocks. In this set-up, the distribution of income and wealth has important implications for macroeconomic outcomes, but also for the efficiency of fiscal and monetary policy, as well as the welfare consequences of economic crises.