People
Econometricians, economic historians and data scientists in one unit
BDAD deliberately mixes people who would not normally share a corridor. Making a national archive machine-readable requires someone who can train a recognition model, someone who knows what a nineteenth-century parish clerk actually wrote down and why, and someone who can say what the resulting measurement error does to a regression coefficient. All three have to be in the room.
Head of unit
Christian Møller Dahl
Professor of Economic History (Econometrics and Data Science), Department of Economics, SDU · Head of BDAD
Works at the intersection of econometrics, machine learning and social-science history. His research programme is to make historical archives usable as data — developing the transcription, structuring and record-linkage methods needed to read handwritten sources at population scale, and using the resulting data to study how early-life conditions, institutions and policy shape outcomes over the life course and across generations. Editor (Methods) of Explorations in Economic History until 2026, and formerly on the executive committee of the Independent Research Fund Denmark | Social Sciences. Also Malmsten Visiting Professor, University of Gothenburg, and Research Associate, University of Cambridge. Affiliated at SDU with HEDG and the Interdisciplinary Centre on Population Dynamics (CPop).
cmd@sam.sdu.dk · SDU profile · ORCID 0000-0001-9880-2818
Researchers
Alexander Klein
Professor of Economic History · joining BDAD from the University of Sussex Business School
An economic historian working on economic geography, agglomeration economics and long-run growth, with a body of work on the spatial development of the United States — the concentration of manufacturing industry, agglomeration externalities in American cities, transport infrastructure and agricultural productivity in the antebellum period, and productivity convergence across US states over more than a century.
His arrival substantially deepens BDAD's space and geography theme. Where the unit has until now built linked life courses primarily in time, Klein brings the spatial economics needed to use them in space — which is precisely what a geocoded census like Geolinking is for.
PhD, CERGE-EI Prague. Previously University of Kent and, as a post-doctoral fellow, the University of Warwick and Jagiellonian University, Krakow. Research Fellow at CEPR and Associate at CAGE (Warwick).
aklein@sam.sdu.dk · SDU profile link · Current profile (Sussex)
Torben S. D. Johansen
Assistant Professor in Econometrics and Data Science, Department of Economics, SDU
Works on causal inference and data science, and in particular on using machine-learning methods to answer questions about the importance of early-life conditions and about policy evaluation. He is a principal author of the unit's transcription systems — HANA, DARE and OccCANINE — and works on methodological development for data creation alongside empirical studies of health interventions. PhD from SDU; visiting scholar at Stanford University in 2022.
SDU profile · Personal site · GitHub
Christian Vedel
Assistant Professor, Department of Economics, SDU
An economic historian working on geography, structural transformation and the long-run development of the Danish economy, and the lead author of OccCANINE. His research combines large digitised historical datasets with quasi-experimental design — the 1825 breach of the Agger Isthmus, the arrival of the railways, the spread of cooperative creameries — and he is building the Copenhagen Tax Books database of 2.1 million taxpayer records. Winner of the Economic History Society's New Researcher Prize, 2023.
SDU profile · Personal site · GitHub
Peter Sandholt Jensen
Professor, Department of Economics and Statistics, Linnaeus University · part-time, Department of Economics, SDU
Works on economic history, growth and development, including the economic consequences of epidemics and the long-run role of institutions. A long-standing collaborator on the unit's archival-data research.
PhD students
Collaborators and alumni
The unit's work is joint with researchers across SDU and beyond. At SDU, that includes Volha Lazuka, who leads the Normalization project, Anthony Wray, who leads WarMED, Paul Sharp, head of HEDG and PI of DANTRADE, Sophie Yiwen Li, co-investigator on WarMED, and Karol J. Borowiecki.
Elsewhere: Jennifer L. Baker and Lise G. Bjerregaard (Center for Clinical Research and Prevention, Copenhagen), Miriam Wüst, Casper Worm Hansen and Asger Mose Wingender (University of Copenhagen), Sam Il Myoung Hwang and Munir Squires (Vancouver School of Economics, UBC), Melissa A. Thomasson (Miami University), Kristin Ranestad (University of Oslo), Hilde Leikny Sommerseth and Bjørn-Richard Pedersen (UiT — The Arctic University of Norway), Nina Boberg-Fazlić (TU Dortmund), Joseph Doyle (MIT), Robert Franzese (University of Michigan), Mikael Lindahl and Gustav Kjellsson (University of Gothenburg), Petter Lundborg (Lund), Martin Karlsson (Duisburg-Essen), Daniel Kühnle, Julius Koschnick and Matthew Curtis.
Former members and co-authors on the transcription systems include Emil N. Sørensen, Christina E. Westermann and Simon F. Wittrock.