Moritz Seebacher

PhD candidate at the ifo Institute and LMU Munich. Labor and education economics with large-scale resume data.

Welcome!

I am Moritz Seebacher, a PhD candidate at the ifo Center for the Economics of Education and LMU Munich. I am an applied microeconomist working at the intersection of labor and education economics. I use large-scale resume data from public LinkedIn profiles to study how human capital, social capital, and technological progress shape career trajectories and access to economic opportunity.

I am on the 2026/27 job market. Expected graduation: Summer 2027.

Fields: Labor Economics · Economics of Education · Big Data Economics

Job Market Paper

  • Online Social Networks and Long-Run Career Success
    Abstract
    PDFHow does access to online social networks at labor market entry affect workers’ careers? I study this question by exploiting the staggered rollout of Facebook across U.S. colleges in a difference-in-differences design, tracking the career trajectories of nearly 800,000 business and economics students through their public LinkedIn profiles. I show that early access to Facebook leads to more successful careers: exposed students work in higher-paying jobs, are 3.8% more likely to receive early-career promotions, and are 3.4% more likely to reach senior leadership roles in their late 30s. I find that these effects can be attributed to (i) a more successful college-to-work transition, driven by help from college peers in accessing higher-quality early-career jobs, (ii) more stable and productive early-career worker-firm matches, and (iii) intensified early-career sorting into higher-quality and career-supporting firms. The results highlight how access to online social networks during a sensitive period of a young worker’s career can reduce information frictions, facilitate the college-to-work transition, and generate long-lasting career benefits.

Publications

  • Pathways to Progress: The Complementarity of Bicycles and Road Infrastructure for Girls’ Education
    Economics of Education Review, 97, 102483, 2023.
    Abstract
    PDFIn which settings can bicycles help to improve girls’ education in low-income countries? This paper analyzes the complementarity between all-weather roads and a bicycle program in India aimed at increasing girls’ secondary school enrollment. Using a triple-difference strategy, I find that the program benefits girls living 3–10 km away from schools with all-weather road connections, increasing their enrollment by 60 percent and reducing the gender enrollment gap by 51 percent. There are no effects for girls in villages without all-weather roads or girls living more than 10 km from school. The findings emphasize the importance and interdependence of road infrastructure, mode of transport, and distance to school for improving girls’ education in India.

Working Papers

  • Multidimensional Skills on LinkedIn Profiles: Measuring Human Capital and the Gender Skill Gap (with David Dorn, Florian Schoner, Lisa Simon, and Ludger Woessmann)
    IZA Discussion Paper No. 17896, 2025.
    Abstract
    PDFWe measure human capital using the self-reported skill sets of nearly 9 million U.S. college graduates from professional profiles on LinkedIn. We aggregate skill strings into 48 clusters of general, occupation-specific, and managerial skills. Multidimensional skills can account for several important labor-market patterns. First, the number and composition of skills are systematically related to measures of human-capital investment such as education and work experience. The number of skills increases with experience, and the average age-skill profile closely resembles the well-established concave age-earnings profile. Second, workers who report more skills, especially specific and managerial ones, hold higher-paid jobs. Skill differences account for more earnings variation than detailed measures of education and experience. Third, we document a sizable gender gap in skills. While women and men report nearly equal numbers of skills shortly after college graduation, women’s skill count increases more slowly with age subsequently. A simple quantitative exercise shows that women’s slower skill accumulation can be fully accounted for by reduced work hours associated with motherhood. The resulting gender differences in skills rationalize a substantial proportion of the gender gap in job-based earnings.

Work in Progress

  • College Alumni Networks, Job Placements, and the College Selectivity Premium (with Cäcilia vom Baur, Katia Werkmeister, and Ludger Woessmann)
    Abstract
    Draft available upon requestWhat is the causal role of college alumni networks in graduates’ first job placement and earnings differences across colleges? Descriptively, graduates from the same college cluster at the same firm three times more than firm and college observables predict. Using resume data from LinkedIn profiles covering over 90 million college×cohort×firm cells, and exploiting plausibly exogenous variation in the timing of alumni firm-to-firm moves around graduates’ job search, we find that each additional alumnus raises the employment probability at this firm by 13%. Alumni in management and those from the same major have a stronger effect. While alumni from elite colleges do not provide stronger ties than alumni from less-selective colleges, they work at better-paying firms. This affects the college selectivity wage premium: alumni networks account for at least 4% of the entry-level wage gap between elite and less-selective colleges.
  • Who Gets Promoted? Evidence from LinkedIn Profiles (with David Dorn and Ludger Woessmann)

Policy Papers (non-refereed)

CV

You can find my CV here.