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About Dennis
Associate Professor Dennis Wesselbaum serves in the Department of Economics at the University of Otago's Otago Business School. He is a macroeconomist with both theoretical and empirical interests, and his research activity is split between macroeconomic topics and the impacts of climate change. Wesselbaum holds a Diploma from the University of Kiel and a Doctorate from the University of Hamburg. Prior to his appointment at Otago, he worked as a researcher at the Kiel Institute for the World Economy. His research interests include macroeconomics, especially monetary and fiscal policy, quantitative economics, economic growth, migration, and more generally the interaction between climate, environment, and society. He welcomes supervision of postgraduate students in areas such as macroeconomics, climate change, drivers and impacts of migration, and financial mathematics focusing on models of conditional correlations and chaos.
Wesselbaum has published extensively in peer-reviewed journals. Key publications include "Revisiting the Climate Driver and Inhibitor Mechanisms of International Migration" (Climate and Development, forthcoming); "Gone with the Wind: International Migration" (with Amelia Aburn, Global and Planetary Change, 2019); "Jobless Recoveries: Interaction between Financial and Search Frictions" (Journal of Macroeconomics, 2019); "Moving Towards Happiness?" (with Arthur Grimes, International Migration, 2019); "Time-Varying Volatility in the U.S. Labor Market" (Journal of Applied Economics, 2018); "Catastrophe Theory and the Financial Crisis" (Scottish Journal of Political Economy, 2017); and "The Intensive Margin Puzzle and Labor Market Adjustment Costs" (Macroeconomic Dynamics, 2016). Recent works encompass "Portfolio Choice with Intra-Household Bargaining and Gender Differences in Preferences" (with A. Guha Thakurta, Scottish Journal of Political Economy, 2026); "Food Insecurity Across Age: Evidence from a Global Study" (with D. Leblang and M.D. Smith, Global Food Security, 2025); "Cost Pass-Through in the Retail Electricity Market: Vertically Integrated versus Independent Retailers" (with P. Gibbard and C. Grubb, Energy Economics, 2025); and "Global Perspectives on COVID-19 Vaccination: Impacts on Well-Being and Inequality" (with D. Leblang and M.D. Smith, Vaccine, 2025). He is Editor-in-Chief of the New Zealand Economic Papers, the journal of the New Zealand Association of Economists, where he also serves as Vice President. Additionally, he has acted as Director of the Otago Foreign Policy School in 2019 and Co-Director in 2021, and serves on related committees at the University of Otago.