Dr Maximilian Longmuir

I am an applied microeconomist working at the intersection of economic inequality, household finance, intergenerational mobility, labor economics, and social policy. Since September 2025, I have been a Research Officer at UNSW, and an Associated Researcher at the Stone Center on Socio-Economic Inequality (CUNY Graduate Center). My research asks how institutions and policies, especially in housing and retirement systems, shape households’ economic security and the distribution of wealth and opportunity over the life course.

My work combines large-scale household survey and administrative data with modern causal and distributional methods to quantify who gains and who loses from policy settings, market shocks, and changing demographic conditions. I aim to produce evidence that is both academically rigorous and directly relevant for policy debates, and I regularly translate findings into policy briefs and research summaries for broader audiences.

Previously, I was a Research Associate at the Stone Center (2023–2025), a Postdoctoral Researcher at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin (2021–2023) on the project “The intergenerational reproduction of wealth inequality and its socio-demographic conditions in Germany”, and an Adjunct Lecturer at the Institute of Labour Economics, Leibniz Universität Hannover (2022–2023). I completed my Ph.D. in Economics at Freie Universität Berlin in the program “Public Economics and Inequality” (awarded November 2021), with the dissertation “Inequality, Risk, and Wealth.” My research has been published in high-impact outlets including Demography, Energy Policy, International Review of Financial Analysis, Journal of Economic Inequality, and Survey Research Methods.

Selected research projects include:

• Saving behaviour and retirement adequacy — analysing how investment risk and portfolio choices shape savings behaviour and later-life resources, including in-depth work on Superannuation wealth in Australia.

• Intergenerational wealth mobility in Germany — providing the first systematic evidence on intergenerational wealth persistence using harmonised SOEP wealth data (1988–2017), highlighting the role of homeownership and housing institutions in cross-country differences.

• Energy expenditure inequality and retrofit policy — modelling household energy spending and the distributional effects of price spikes, with policy implications for affordability and fiscal design.