The Department of Economics is happy to welcome Rudi Bachmann as a new Professor of Economics! Rudi comes to Michigan from Notre Dame, where he also served as a Professor of Economics. Before that, he was an Assistant Professor of Economics at…the University of Michigan, making this more of a “welcome back.”
Originally from Germany, Rudi got his start at the University of Mainz, where he received degrees in Economics, Philosophy, and Spanish. He finished his Ph.D. at Yale in 2007 and then came to Michigan for the first time. Between then and now, he has served as a full professor at RWTH Aachen University, Goethe University Frankfurt, and the University of Notre Dame, as well as a visitor at the University of Pennsylvania, Harvard, and Yale.
Rudi’s research interests lie in macroeconomics. Earlier in his career, he described himself as a model builder who dealt with heterogeneous firms. Over time, his interests have evolved into questions surrounding expectation formation and uncertainty as well as the use of survey methods.
In his free time, Rudi serves as an amateur "chauffeur and event coordinator” for his teenage children. He enjoys listening to podcasts about economics and current affairs in Germany as well as reading from social science disciplines other than economics. This semester, he’ll be teaching ECON 402, and he looks forward to the challenge of scaling up a class that he taught for 40-50 students to several hundred.
