Matthias BannertView profile
Lecturer
Matthias Bannert is a Lecturer at the Department of Management, Technology, and Economics at ETH Zürich, where he works at the KOF Swiss Economic Institute (Konjunkturforschungsstelle). His work focuses on the intersection of economics, software development, and data management, with particular expertise in time series analysis and official statistics. Bannert designs solutions for state-of-the-art data processing, management, and publishing of economic data and research. Bannert completed his doctoral thesis titled "Survey Based Research in Economics - Essays on Methodology, Economic Applications and Long Term Processing of Economic Survey Data" at ETH Zürich in 2016. His academic journey began when he joined KOF in late 2008, initially working as a researcher for the Business Tendency Survey group before transitioning to the institute's IT department. Dr. Bannert's research interests span several interconnected domains at the nexus of economics and data science. He specializes in developing software environments for official statistics, with particular focus on processing and managing economic time series data through open-source driven data pipelines. His technical expertise includes R programming and PostgreSQL database systems, which he applies to create robust solutions for economic data analysis. Bannert is particularly interested in survey methodology, nowcasting techniques, and the development of reproducible research workflows. His work bridges the gap between theoretical economics and practical software implementation, ensuring that economic research can leverage state-of-the-art data processing techniques. Analysis of Bannert's publication record reveals a consistent focus on the application of data science techniques to economic research problems, particularly in the domain of official statistics and survey-based economics. His work demonstrates a progression from theoretical survey methodology to practical software implementation, with increasing emphasis on real-time economic forecasting and data management systems. A distinctive feature of his research is the development of open-source R packages that make advanced economic data analysis more accessible to researchers and practitioners. As an active contributor to the R language for Statistical computing and the open source community, Bannert has developed several notable software packages including timeseriesdb, tstools, and kofdata, which are available on CRAN. These tools reflect his commitment to creating reproducible, transparent, and efficient workflows for economic data analysis. Bannert serves as a data science supervisor for multiple KOF research projects and is a co-Principal Investigator in an SNF-funded Digital Lives project in collaboration with KOF's labor market expert group. His teaching activities include "Hacking for Sciences - An Applied Guide to Programming with Data" and involvement in the Nowcasting Lab, which provides live out-of-sample forecasting and model testing capabilities for economic researchers. Dr. Bannert is affiliated with the KOF Swiss Economic Institute, where he contributes to several research groups including the KOF Macroeconomic Forecasting group and the KOF Data Science and Macroeconomic Methods group. His work at KOF bridges the institute's traditional economic research with modern data science approaches, helping to position the institute at the forefront of data-driven economic analysis.