Julian Streyczek

Bocconi University • Economics Department

Pic_Brisighella.JPG

Hello there! I’m an applied data scientist with a PhD in Economics from Bocconi University (Milan). My work has been supported by the German Academic Scholarship Foundation (Studienstiftung), and a five-month research visit at Harvard University.

I use data and advanced statistical methods to help understand how digital technologies, platforms, and institutions shape user behavior. Most of my work starts from messy real-world data: web traffic, social media, public records, text, APIs, and scraped websites. I turn these into clear evidence using modern methods in causal inference and machine learning, combined with careful measurement and a bit of creativity.

On this website, you’ll find an overview of my work, including:

  • Academic research:
    • I built a dataset on newspaper paywalls, web traffic, online readership, and large-scale surveys to show how restricting access to local news reduces political knowledge and electoral participation.
    • I built a dataset on scientists and their research to show that economists’ social media usage increases research production and attention, while aligning networks and research topics with other social media users.
  • Teaching slides on machine learning in economic research: I taught an undergraduate mini-course at Bocconi on how machine learning and rich data can answer real-world policy questions, from predicting restaurant health violations with review texts to measuring poverty from satellite images.
  • The Economist’s Guide to Causal Forests: I explain the intuition and statistics behind causal forests, including how they connect machine learning with causal inference and how to implement them in R.
  • Ballotpedia state legislature scraper: I wrote an R scraper that collects and formats historical party-composition data for U.S. state legislative chambers when I couldn’t find a ready-made dataset.
  • This website: I maintain this site as a customized Jekyll/GitHub Pages project forked from the al-folio theme.

I’m interested in data science roles where causal reasoning, machine learning, and product analytics bring value. If you’d like to get in contact, feel free to reach out via Email or LinkedIn.