PhD defense of Nicole Bellert

Congratulations to Nicole Bellert for defending her PhD Thesis “On Dark Figures – Estimating and Simulating Hidden Population Sizes of Illegal Activity” 🎉

In her dissertation, Nicole proposes a novel structural framework addressing the sample selection bias and simultaneity inherent in unobserved illegal activities. By simultaneously estimating a product of two probit models using instrumental variables, her approach successfully disentangles and identifies the distinct probabilities of crime occurrence and crime detection. Her interdisciplinary work was hosted within UZH’s Communication Systems Group (Prof. Burkhard Stiller) and Computation and Economics Research Group (Dr. Sven Seuken), primarily advised by Dr. Andrea Günster (ZHAW) in close scientific collaboration with Prof. Damian Kozbur (UZH).