Philipp Barteska

Philipp Barteska

I am a Postdoctoral Fellow at Harvard Kennedy School (HKS).

In the summer of 2025, I will join the University of Hong Kong (HKU) as an Assistant Professor of Economics. I completed my PhD in Economics at the London School of Economics (LSE) in June 2024.

My research interests center on the fields of development economics, political economy, and organizational economics.

My current projects focus on the effects of state and bureaucratic capacity on firms in developing countries, in particular how the effect of policies targeting firms - especially industrial policies - depends on the capacity with which they are implemented.

Research

Bureaucrats and the Korean Export Miracle

What makes an industrial policy successful? This paper finds that the effect of an industrial policy changes tremendously with the implementing bureaucrat. We study Korean bureaucrats who promote exports on appointments to 87 countries between 1965, when Korea was one of the world’s poorest countries, and 2001. We exploit the rotation of bureaucrats between countries to show that individual bureaucrats matter greatly in boosting exports. Moving from a bureaucrat at the 20th percentile to the median is associated with a 40% increase in exports. This effect is comparable to that of opening an office, implying that this industrial policy has no effect under a 20th percentile bureaucrat. We exploit differential import demand growth to study a mechanism via which better bureaucrats increase exports - transmitting information about market conditions. Under better bureaucrats Korean exports increase more with a product’s import demand. Finally, we investigate whether experience can bridge the gaps between bureaucrats. We isolate quasi-random variation in experience exploiting a product’s import demand growth during the bureaucrat’s first appointment. In subsequent appointments exports increase in products with greater bureaucrat experience. This highlights learning-by-doing as a channel to build bureaucratic capacity. However, the differences between bureaucrats are larger than the effect of experience, suggesting selecting good bureaucrats may be more important than training them.

Mass Vaccination and Educational Attainment: Evidence from the 1967 Measles Eradication Campaign in the United States

We show that the first nationwide mass vaccination campaign against measles increased educational attainment in the United States. Our empirical strategy exploits variation in exposure to the childhood disease across states right before the Measles Eradication Campaign of 1967–68, which reduced reported measles incidence by 90 percent within two years. Our results suggest that mass vaccination against measles increased the years of education on average by about 0.1 years in the affected cohorts. We also find tentative evidence that the college graduation rate of men increased.

Bureaucrat-Firm Relationships and the Success of Labor Market Policy

Bureaucrats who Risk Kidnappings to Go to Work? Experiments on Social Norms in Haïti's Bureaucracy

The Capacity to Regulate – How Low State Capacity Worsens Capital Misallocation

Investigating the Deep: Weberian or Patronage Networks in Haïti's Bureaucracy?

Teaching

Development and Growth

LSE: 2019-2023 (MSc-level)

LSE Class Teacher Bonus Award, Economics Department - 2020-2023 (based on students’ ratings)

  • “Very organized and clear.” (Spring 2023)
  • “He is very enthusiastic when teaching” (Spring 2022)
  • “The teacher encourages a lot of participation!” (Spring 2021)
  • “Philipp is very dynamic and the slides are helpful” (Fall 2020)
  • “Very clear step-by-step explanation of assignment and very insightful interpretation of the result.” (Fall 2022)
  • “Very interesting and being taught in a very engaging manner.” (Fall 2020)
  • “He was always ready to help however trivial the doubt was. He engaged us all and made the subject interesting.” (Spring 2021)

My overall teaching evaluations (out of 5) for recent semesters were 4.6 (Spring 2022), 4.7 (Spring 2021), 4.5 (Fall 2022), 4.7 (Fall 2021), 4.6 (Fall 2020)

Quantitative Text Analysis

LSE: Spring 2022 (MSc- and PhD-level)

Public Economics

LSE: Summer 2018 (BSc-level)

Advanced Microeconomics 1

London Business School: Fall 2017 (PhD-level)

Intermediate Econometrics

Universitat Pompeu Fabra: Spring 2017 (BSc-level)

Advanced Microeconomics 1

Universitat Pompeu Fabra: Fall 2016 (PhD-level)