Marvin Immesberger

About

I am a PhD candidate in economics at the University of Bonn and a researcher at ZEW Mannheim.

I am advised by Hans-Martin von Gaudecker and Thomas Dohmen. My research is in public and labor economics — the design of tax, transfer, and pension systems and how households respond to them — combining administrative micro-data with large-scale computational and structural microsimulation.

Research

My interests span public economics, pensions, and labor economics, together with the computational and structural methods used to study household behavior.

Modelling Retirement Behavior

Work in progress · with Teresa Backhaus and Hans-Martin von Gaudecker

A structural model of retirement and benefit-claiming decisions that integrates rational financial optimization with cognitive defaults.

Policy

Gesetzliche Kapitalrente: Simulationen im Rahmen der Alterssicherungskommission

A statutory funded pension: simulations for the German pension commission.

We simulated the proposed funded pension (“Kapitalrente”) to support the commission’s deliberations.

ZEW Gutachten · 2026 · with Tabea Bucher-Koenen and Marius Cziriak

Software

GETTSIM — German Taxes and Transfers Simulator

Co-author & maintainer

An open-source microsimulation model of the German tax and transfer system, built in Python. I maintain GETTSIM and its wider ecosystem — including SOEP data preparation, example personas, and related tooling — used across research and policy. Documentation · Introduction (in German).

Teaching

  • W 25/26Applied Data Analytics (BSc)
  • S 23Public Finance and Social Policy (BSc)
  • W 22/23Effective Programming Practices for Economists (MSc/PhD)
  • W 21/22 & 22/23Econometrics (BSc)

CV

You can find my full CV here.