Lamar Crombach

Lamar Crombach successfully defended his PhD dissertation “Mismatched Motives: The Economic Consequences of Distorted Incentives in the Public Sector” on the 26th of July, 2024 at ETH Zurich. His major research interests include political economy (electoral budget cycles, fiscal-monetary interaction, corruption) and demography (fertility, media, life expectancy and inequality). As an intern at UN Trade & Development (UNCTAD) in 2023, he has worked on their flagship Least Developed Countries Report 2023 and Cambodia’s Vulnerability Profile. He has published articles in, among other journals, the Journal of Public Economics and Scientific Data. Recently, Lamar, together with Jeroen Smits, has contributed the Sub-national Corruption Database (SCD), which measures the experiences with petty corruption and the perceptions of grand corruption at the sub-national level in 1,473 sub-national regions in 178 countries between 1995-2022. The SCD is also available on the Global Data Lab.

Recent publications

Crombach, L. & Smits, J. (2024). Understanding the urban-rural fertility divide in sub-Saharan Africa: The critical role of social isolation. Population, Space and Place, e2801, doi:10.1002/psp.2801.

Crombach, L. & Bohn, F. (2024). The "Benefits" of Being Small: Loose Fiscal Policy in the European Monetary Union. Journal of Public Economics, 234, 105120, doi:10.1016/j.jpubeco.2024.105120.

Crombach, L. & Smits, J. (2024). The Subnational Corruption Database: Grand and petty corruption in 1,473 regions of 178 countries, 1995-2022. Scientific Data (Nature), 11, 686, doi:10.1038/s41597-024-03505-8.

Crombach, L. & Smits, J. (2024). Understanding the Urban-Rural Fertility Divide in sub-Saharan Africa: The Critical Role of Social Isolation. Population, Space and Place, 30. e2801.

Crombach, L. & Smits, J. (2020). The demographic window of opportunity and economic growth at sub-national level in 91 developing countries. GDL Working paper 20-101.