Dejan Kovač, Ph.D.

Dejan Kovač, Ph.D.
Aktuelle Position

seit 9/21

Wissenschaftlicher Mitarbeiter der Abteilung Strukturwandel und Produktivität

Leibniz-Institut für Wirtschaftsforschung Halle (IWH)


  • internationale Wirtschaftswissenschaften
  • Verhaltensökonomik
  • politische Ökonomie

Dejan Kovač ist seit September 2021 wissenschaftlicher Mitarbeiter in der Abteilung Strukturwandel und Produktivität. Seine Forschungsschwerpunkte umfassen internationale Wirtschaftswissenschaften, politische Ökonomie und Verhaltensökonomik.

Dejan Kovač studierte an der University of Zagreb und am Center for Economic Research and Graduate Education – Economics Institute in Prag, wo er auch promovierte. Bevor er zum IWH kam, war er wissenschaftlicher Mitarbeiter an der Princeton University.

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Dejan Kovač, Ph.D.
Dejan Kovač, Ph.D.
Mitglied - Abteilung Strukturwandel und Produktivität
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O Brother, Where Start Thou? Sibling Spillovers on College and Major Choice in Four Countries

Adam Altmejd Andrés Barrios-Fernández Marin Drlje Joshua Goodman Michael Hurwitz Dejan Kovač Christine Mulhern Christopher Neilson Jonathan Smith

in: Quarterly Journal of Economics, Nr. 3, 2021


Family and social networks are widely believed to influence important life decisions, but causal identification of those effects is notoriously challenging. Using data from Chile, Croatia, Sweden, and the United States, we study within-family spillovers in college and major choice across a variety of national contexts. Exploiting college-specific admissions thresholds that directly affect older but not younger siblings’ college options, we show that in all four countries a meaningful portion of younger siblings follow their older sibling to the same college or college-major combination. Older siblings are followed regardless of whether their target and counterfactual options have large, small, or even negative differences in quality. Spillover effects disappear, however, if the older sibling drops out of college, suggesting that older siblings’ college experiences matter. That siblings influence important human capital investment decisions across such varied contexts suggests that our findings are not an artifact of particular institutional detail but a more generalizable description of human behavior. Causal links between the postsecondary paths of close peers may partly explain persistent college enrollment inequalities between social groups, and this suggests that interventions to improve college access may have multiplier effects.

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Names and Behavior in a War

Štěpán Jurajda Dejan Kovač

in: Journal of Population Economics, Nr. 1, 2021


We implement a novel empirical strategy for measuring and studying a strong form of nationalism—the willingness to fight and die in a war for national independence—using name choices corresponding to a previous war leader. Based on data on almost half a million soldiers, we first show that having been given a first name that is synonymous with the leader(s) of the Croatian state during World War II predicts volunteering for service in the 1991–1995 Croatian war of independence and dying during the conflict. Next, we use the universe of Croatian birth certificates and the information about nationalism conveyed by first names to suggests that in ex-Yugoslav Croatia, nationalism rose continuously starting in the 1970s and that its rise was curbed in areas where concentration camps were located during WWII. Our evidence on intergenerational transmission of nationalism is consistent with nationalist fathers purposefully reflecting the trade-off between within-family and society-wide transmission channels of political values. We also link the nationalist values we proxy using first name choices to right-wing voting behavior in 2015, 20 years after the war.

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Information Feedback in Temporal Networks as a Predictor of Market Crashes

Stjepan Begušić Zvonko Kostanjčar Dejan Kovač Boris Podobnik H. Eugene Stanley

in: Complexity, September 2018


In complex systems, statistical dependencies between individual components are often considered one of the key mechanisms which drive the system dynamics observed on a macroscopic level. In this paper, we study cross-sectional time-lagged dependencies in financial markets, quantified by nonparametric measures from information theory, and estimate directed temporal dependency networks in financial markets. We examine the emergence of strongly connected feedback components in the estimated networks, and hypothesize that the existence of information feedback in financial networks induces strong spatiotemporal spillover effects and thus indicates systemic risk. We obtain empirical results by applying our methodology on stock market and real estate data, and demonstrate that the estimated networks exhibit strongly connected components around periods of high volatility in the markets. To further study this phenomenon, we construct a systemic risk indicator based on the proposed approach, and show that it can be used to predict future market distress. Results from both the stock market and real estate data suggest that our approach can be useful in obtaining early-warning signals for crashes in financial markets.

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Adnan Efendic Dejan Kovač Jacob N. Shapiro

in: IWH Discussion Papers, Nr. 11, 2022



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Randall K. Filer Dejan Kovač Jacob N. Shapiro Stjepan Srhoj

in: IWH Discussion Papers, Nr. 10, 2021



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