Friederike Greb

I work as a Post Doc at the chair of agricultural policy at Goettingen University. I studied mathematics (with philosophy as a minor) in Heidelberg, Santiago de Chile and Berlin, then analyzed exchange rates at the Inter-American Development Bank and tried to model air quality within a project on megacities of the German Helmholtz Association for a little bit, before enganging in my PhD research at the Courant Research Center "Poverty, Equity and Growth in Developing Countries" at Goettingen University. I am interested in all kinds of questions related to a sustainable development of the world, in particular understanding extreme poverty, the factors driving it, what we can do about it, global justice and our responsibility for suffering in faraway places.

My specific area of research is price transmission analysis. It looks at how price shocks are transmitted between various markets in different locations or between the world market and domestic markets, that is, for example, in which way recent price peaks for wheat or rice on the world market have affected people in developing countries. The current workhorse in this field is a type of time series model called threshold vector error correction model. The reasoning behind it is very intuitive when considering a pair of two markets, but -- at least to my mind -- does not appear appropriate when really these two markets form part of a larger network. Searching for a different set of tools to handle this extended setting is what got me interested in complex systems. This is completely new territory for me and I hope that during the course of this summer school I will be able to gain some understanding of this area of research and its potential applicability to price transmission analysis. Well, and really, it's more than just this, I think it is intriguing to study an approach that appears to be useful in so many different fields of science.