Rate My Professor Paul Gaggl

Paul Gaggl is an Associate Professor of Economics and Director of the M.S. in Economics Program at the Belk College of Business, University of North Carolina at Charlotte, where he has been on the faculty since 2012. He earned his Ph.D. in Economics from the University of California, Davis in 2012, an M.A. in Economics from the same institution in 2007, an M.A. (Mag. rer. soc. oec.) from the University of Vienna, Austria, and holds additional qualifications including a Postgraduate Diploma in Economics from the Institute for Advanced Studies in Vienna and an M.A. in Computer Science and Economics from the University of Vienna. Prior to joining UNC Charlotte, Gaggl served as a Visiting Researcher at the Austrian Central Bank and Research Fellow at the Austrian Institute of Economic Research.

Gaggl's research specializes in the distributional effects of technology adoption, encompassing AI, automation, information and communication technologies, and electricity, with a focus on heterogeneous impacts on different types of workers and the distribution of income between labor and capital. His studies address labor market polarization, jobless recoveries since 1990, and broader automation effects. Key publications include 'Structural Change in Production Networks and Economic Growth' (with Aspen Gorry and Christian vom Lehn), forthcoming in Review of Economic Studies (2026); 'Does Electricity Drive Structural Transformation? Evidence from the United States' (with Rowena Gray, Ioana Marinescu, and Miguel Morin), Labour Economics (2021); 'On the Welfare Implications of Automation' (with Maya Eden), Review of Economic Dynamics (2018); and 'A Short-Run View of What Computers Do: Evidence from a UK Tax Incentive' (with Greg Wright), American Economic Journal: Applied Economics (2017). He is a research associate in the CESifo Research Network (Economics of Digitization), co-founder and co-organizer of the I-85 Macroeconomics Workshop, and holds affiliate positions in UNC Charlotte's School of Data Science and Public Policy program. Gaggl received the Belk College of Business Best Paper Award in 2018 and has obtained research grants from UNC Charlotte, the World Bank, and other sources. His work has been featured in media outlets including NPR, VoxEU, and The New York Times.