Dr. Gerda Asmus-Bluhm is a postdoctoral researcher at the Chair of Development Economics (Prof. Andreas Fuchs) at Göttingen University and is part of the ongoing project Economic and Ideological Causes of Political Radicalization and Violence Link within the Research Cooperation Lower Saxony - Israel of the Volkswagen Foundation and the Lower Saxony Ministry of Science and Culture. She defended her PhD thesis "Essays in Political Economy - Historical Natural Experiments and Economic Development" in October 2022. Her thesis was supervised by Prof. Dr. Axel Dreher (Heidelberg U) and Dr. Raphael Franck (Hebrew U).



Her work has been funded by grants from the DFG (German Research Foundation), the Israeli Council for Higher Education (CHE), and the Excellence Initiative of the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (FoF4). In the past, she was a visiting researcher at the Political Science Department of the University of California San Diego, USA (2019-2022), the Economics Department of The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel (2018/2019), and the College of William & Mary and AidData, USA (2016).