Philipp Hilmbauer-Hofmarcher has been a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Complexity Science Hub since January 2026. He is a member of the Transforming Economies team, where he studies how cities shape professional networks, workplace segregation, and labor market outcomes.

His research focuses on labor market segregation along ethnic and gender lines, with particular attention to how workplace composition and professional networks influence employment trajectories and wages. Leveraging large-scale administrative data from Austria, he examines patterns of workplace segregation across establishments, the formation of coworker-based networks, and how these dynamics differ across cities of varying sizes. A key objective of his work is to understand whether cities act as engines of opportunity or instead reinforce labor market stratification.

Philipp is particularly interested in empirical and interdisciplinary research at the intersection of labor economics, urban and regional economics, economic history, and political economy. His methodological approach relies on quasi-natural experiments, administrative data, and causal inference techniques to study long-run labor market and social outcomes.

He is finishing his PhD in Economics at Central European University. During his doctoral studies, he investigated the long-run effects of historical shocks in Austria, with a focus on labor markets, population dynamics, and political outcomes. Much of his work examined the aftermath of World War II and the subsequent occupation of Austria, including recent research on the long-run socioeconomic consequences of the war for Vienna.