Through our Masterclass Series, we invite distinguished researchers to Berlin for teaching sessions on key topics in labour economics and related fields. The masterclasses are open to all, with admission by application.
RFBerlin Masterclass by Andreas Ferrara: 14 June 2027
Andreas Ferrara is an Associate Professor in the Department of Economics at the University of Pittsburgh and a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER). He is a Fellow of the RFBerlin Network and a faculty affiliate at the Center for Governance and Markets (CGM) at the University of Pittsburgh, as well as at the Centre for Competitive Advantage in the Global Economy (CAGE) at the University of Warwick, where he earned his PhD. He currently serves on the editorial boards of Explorations in Economic History and the Journal of Economic History. Ferrara’s research spans economic history, labour economics, and political economy.
Event Details:
Morning Sessions
1. Tools and workflow: what LLMs do well and where they fail, the main ways of using them (chat interfaces, agentic coding assistants, and APIs), and a step-by-step workflow for turning a research idea into working code and data, including which parts of the work should stay with the researcher.
2. Building an LLM pipeline: whether confidential or licensed data can be sent to a hosted model (and self-hosted alternatives if not), choosing models, designing prompts, managing context limits, and keeping large jobs affordable.
Afternoon Sessions
3. Validation, reproducibility, and inference: hand-coded validation samples, model version drift, replication packages and disclosure, and why LLM-generated variables carry non-classical measurement error, along with current tests and corrections.
4. Applications: extracting data from scanned and handwritten records, harmonizing measures such as occupations, linking records without unique identifiers, measuring newspaper sentiment at scale, and scoring emotion in paintings and speech audio, followed by a discussion of participants’ own research projects.
The final schedule and additional information will be shared with successful applicants closer to the event.
Application Process:
Application Deadline: 19 April 2027
Decision Notification: 30April, subject to adjustment based on the volume of applications received.
To apply, please use the application form below. Participation is free, but travel and accommodation costs are not covered. Applications are open to PhD students, postdoctoral researchers, and early-career academics.
If you have any questions or need further information, feel free to contact us using the form or email us at [email protected]
