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 education and labor 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

  • Career Effects of Online Social Network Access at Labor Market Entry
    Abstract
    PDFExploiting the staggered introduction of Facebook across U.S. colleges in a difference-in-differences design, I estimate the causal impact of online social network access at labor market entry on the career trajectories of business and economics students. Using data from nearly 900,000 public LinkedIn profiles, I find that students with early access to Facebook are more likely to receive early-career promotions, work in higher-paying jobs, and reach senior leadership roles in their mid-30s to early 40s. Investigating potential mechanisms, I provide evidence that these effects can be explained by (i) a more successful college-to-work transition, driven by college peers helping each other access higher-quality early-career jobs, (ii) more stable and productive worker-firm matches early on, enabling students to climb up the career ladder within their organizations, 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 facilitate the college-to-work transition, reduce information frictions, 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

  • Alumni Networks, First Job Placements, and the College Selectivity Premium (with Cäcilia vom Baur, Katia Werkmeister, and Ludger Woessmann)
    Abstract
    Draft available upon requestHow important are college alumni networks for graduates’ first job placement and earnings differences across colleges? Using detailed resume data from the universe of public LinkedIn profiles, we show that graduates of selective four-year U.S. colleges disproportionately start their careers at alumni-connected firms, more than location and sector preferences predict. Alumni networks also differ sharply in quality: alumni from elite colleges are 70 percent more likely to work at high-paying firms and 26 percent more likely to hold management positions than those from the least selective colleges. To examine the causal link between alumni and graduates’ first job placements, we exploit plausibly exogenous variation in the timing of alumni firm-to-firm moves around graduates’ job search. One additional alumnus at a firm before graduates complete their job search raises the probability that a graduate starts there by 13% relative to the baseline match probability. The effect is stronger for alumni in management and from the same major, as well as at less selective colleges. Yet, alumni draw more and less selective college graduates into different firms, affecting the college selectivity wage premium: Incorporating the causal estimates into a decomposition framework, we find that alumni networks account for at least 4% of the entry-level wage gap between elite and less-selective colleges. The results highlight that alumni networks play an important role in first job placement and serve as one mechanism behind the widely documented early-career earnings differences across 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.