Elena Catharina Lutz

Elena is interested in urban socioeconomic segregation and income inequality. She researches what policymakers can do to lower residential and experienced segregation of different households in cities. For example, she studies how relaxing land use regulation affects residential segregation and whether improving public transportation leads to more meetings between high- and low-income households in public and semi-public spaces. To answer these questions, she combines administrative data with big data, e.g. from web-​scraping or mobile phones. She employs techniques from urban economics, quantitative policy analysis, and causal inference.

Elena is a PhD candidate in Urban Policy and Urban Economics at ETH Zürich. She holds an MSc in Political Economy of Europe from the LSE and a BSc in International Economics from the University of Tübingen, both times graduating with the best GPA. For her master’s thesis, she received the Nathaniel Lichtfeld Award for the best master’s thesis in regional studies. During her studies, she also spent a semester at the University of Hong Kong, completed internships at the German Central Bank, the German Development Agency (GIZ), the Walter Eucken Institute for Economic Research, and worked part-​time at Ernst & Young.