Research Focus

• Public Economics:  Tax Evasion, Fiscal Federalism, Interregional Redistribution
• Law and Economics:  Economics of Crime, Law Enforcement
• Behavioral Economics:  Social Norms, Fairness, Reference Groups

Academic Career

• since 09|2011 Professor of Economics, University of Marburg
• 12|2007 – 08|2011 Senior Researcher, MPI
• 03|2009 – 06|2009 Visiting Fellow, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor
• 06|2007 – 12|2007 Post Doc, CREED, University of Amsterdam
• 04|2006 – 06|2007 Research Fellow, Seminar for Economic Policy, University of Munich
• 03|2006 PhD in Economics (summa cum laude), University of Munich
• 11|2004 – 05|2005 Visiting Fellow, CREED, University of Amsterdam
• 10|2002 – 03|2006 PhD Student, Munich Graduate School of Economics, University of Munich
• 10|1995 – 10|2001 Undergraduate Student in Economics , University of Vienna and Carlos III de Madrid

Published & Forthcoming Papers

• Majority Voting and the Welfare Implications of Tax Avoidance, July 2011, Journal of Public Economics, forthcoming.
  An earlier version is available as Working Paper 2009-22, Max Planck Institute for Research on Collective Goods.
• Testing Enforcement Strategies in the Field: Threat, Moral Appeal and Social Information (with Gerlinde Fellner and Rupert Sausgruber), June 2011, Journal of the European Economic Association, forthcoming. (This paper is a substantially revised version of Working Paper 2009-31, Max Planck Institute for Research on Collective Goods.)
• Enforcement Spillovers (with Johannes Rincke), Review of Economics and Statistics, forthcoming.
  An earlier version was titled Deterrence through Word of Mouth, MPI Working Paper 2009-04
• Norms, moods and free lunch: Longitudinal evidence on payments from a Pay-What-You-Want restaurant (with Gerhard Rienner), Journal of Socio-Economics, forthcoming.
• Optimal Observability in a Linear Income Tax (with Joel Slemrod), Economics Letters, 2010, Vol.108(2), 105-108.
• The Interaction of Legal and Social Norm Enforcement  (with Sebastian Kube), Journal of Public Economic Theory, forthcoming.
• Social Norms and the Indirect Evolution of Conditional Cooperation (with Mathias Spichtig, University of Amsterdam), Journal of Economics, 2011, Vol. 102 (3), p. 237-262.
• Social Norms and Conditional Cooperative Taxpayers, European Journal of Political Economy, 2010, Vol. 26, 89-103.
• Reserve prices as reference points – Evidence from auctions for football players at hattrick.org (with Stefan Trautmann), Journal of Economic Psychology, 2010, Vol.31(2), p.230-240.
• Voting over Taxes: The Case of Tax Evasion, Public Choice, 2009, Vol. 140(1), 43-58.
• Tax Evasion and Auditing in a Federal Economy (with Sven Stöwhase), International Tax and Public Finance, 2005, Vol. 12 (4), 515-531.

Working Papers

• Poverty and crime in 19th century Germany: A reassessment (with Carsten Burhop), Max Planck Institute for Research on Collective Goods, Working Paper 2010-35
  
• Survey Evidence on Conditional Norm Enforcement (with Joachim Winter, University of Munich), Max Planck Institute for Research on Collective Goods, Working Paper 2009-03.
• Apportionment, Fiscal Equalization and Decentralized Tax Enforcement (with Andreas Reutter), Max Planck Institute for Research on Collective Goods, Working Paper 2008-21.
  

Work in Progress

• Panel evidence on the causal effect of alcohol on crime for Prussia, 1882-1913 (with Carsten Burhop)
• Income Taxation, Tax Enforcement and Occupational Choice (with Rainald Borck)
• Interest Group Formation, Information Transmission and Political Convergence – An Experiment (with Ernesto Reuben and Frans van Winden)
• The Dynamics of Legal and Social Norm Enforcement (with Sebastian Kube)

Workshops and Seminars

The Bonn & Paris Workshop on Law and Economics

Law&Econ Workshop, University of Bonn

Publications

Teaching