Biography

Lorenz is an economist and obtained his PhD from Freie Universität Berlin. His research focuses on the political economy of the welfare state, inequality, and social mobility.

His research projects investigate

  • How low benefit take-up of welfare programs and resulting poverty may be explained by administrative complexity
  • How perceptions of social mobility shape populist attitudes and voting behaviour in the United States
  • How proximity to terror attacks changes individuals' risk attitudes
  • How the "big shift" to work from home affects income inequality through access to the stock market

During his PhD, Lorenz was a Visiting Fellow at the World Inequality Lab at the Paris School of Economics (2025), Harvard’s Opportunity Insights Lab (2024), and the Department of Political Economy at King’s College London (2023). He has also contributed to policy work at DIW, the OECD, and the United Nations.

For more information, please see his personal website.

Research Areas

Economic inequality

Programme Teams

Economics, Inequality & Opportunity (EIO)

Related Projects

Large Language Models for Inequality Research

Our team pursues two strands of research, examining (1) how the rise of artificial intelligence affects employment patterns, income inequality, and wealth inequality, and (2) how these new tools can reveal new insights into patterns of inequality.
Poverty & Income Inequality

Our team aims to provide evidence-based guidance on how state policies can make life better for low-income households.
Social Mobility & Economic Opportunity

Using a mix of administrative and survey data, we study how childhood exposure to poverty shapes later-life outcomes, and which policies are most effective at breaking the intergenerational cycle of poverty.