Personal Profile

Academic Background

Carlo Hofer is a final-year PhD candidate in quantitative political science at the University of Warwick, and a post-doctoral research associate at QMUL. Carlo holds an MSc from the University of Venice as well as a BSc in Business and Computer Science from the Technical University of Munich (TUM).

Dissertation

Working title: “Contextual effects: how changes in the neighbourhood affect individual behaviour”. Carlo Hofer’s thesis explores the relationship between neighbourhood characteristics and individual behaviour through a series of quasi-experimental studies. Carlo leverages newly released localised micro data on individual attitudes and behaviour to investigate a series of natural experiments. Carlo shows how treated subjects react to different types of shocks in their neighbourhood. Carlo’s dissertation is supervised by Prof Vincenzo Bove and Dr Andreas Murr.

Research Interests

• Contextual effects
• Affective polarisation
• Internet and social media
• Climate change
• Segregation and attitudes towards immigration
• Terrorism

Research Agenda

Working Papers

• Good neighbours: Exposure to diversity in the neighbourhood improves attitudes towards immigration. (Bartik IV)
• Downloading polarisation: Consuming political content online increases affective polarisation. (2SLS)
• Ecological and economic cost of terror: The impact of terrorist attacks on commuting patterns. (Natural experiment)

Planned

• When does the pie stop growing? Decreasing marginal returns of broadband performance on internet consumption.
• Which terrorist attacks attract more media attention and why? (ML Random forest)
• Housing prices and economic voting: How the cost of living crisis splits constituencies based on home ownership.
• Contextual effects of climate change on affective polarisation.
• The sociotropic spillover of the Chinese import shock.

Affiliations and Activities

• Research associate

  TBA

• Research associate

  Terror - Attitudes - Wellbeing ESRC funded project

• Senior Graduate Teaching Assistant

  Introduction to Quantitative political analysis I & II

• Co-Founder and Co-Chair (2022)

  Inter-disciplinary ‘Quantitative Solutions & Networking Series’ on advanced quantitative methods.

• Co-Chair (2021-2022)

  Departmental ‘Critical Research and International Political Studies’ (CRIPS) graduate working group.

Awards and Scholarships

• Departmental Scholarship offered by the Department of Politics and International Studies.
• Funded visiting PhD position (2022) at the University of Gothenburg (EUTOPIA Doctoral Mobility Programme).
• Monetary prize (EUR1000) for undergraduate dissertation with full grades (top 1% of cohort).