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

• 12|2007 – present 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

Research Papers

Law and Economics

• Enforcement Spillovers (with Johannes Rincke), resubmitted to Review of Economics and Statistics; an earlier version was titled Deterrence through Word of Mouth, MPI Working Paper 2009-04
• Testing Enforcement Strategies in the Field: Legal Threat, Moral Appeal and Social Information (with Gerlinde Fellner and Rupert Sausgruber), Max Planck Institute for Research on Collective Goods, Working Paper 2009-3
• Survey Evidence on Conditional Norm Enforcement (with Joachim Winter, University of Munich), Max Planck Institute for Research on Collective Goods, Working Paper 2009-03.
• The Interaction of Legal and Social Norm Enforcement (with Sebastian Kube), available upon request.
• Alcohol and Crime: Evidence from Prussia, 1882-1914 (with Carsten Burhop), work in progress.

Public Economics

• Optimal Observability in a Linear Income Tax (with Joel Slemrod).
• Majority Voting and the Welfare Implications of Tax Avoidance, MPI Working Paper 2009-22, invited for resubmission to Journal of Public Economics.
• Voting over Taxes: The Case of Tax Evasion, Public Choice, 2009, Vol. 140(1), 43-58.
• Social Norms and Conditional Cooperative Taxpayers, European Journal of Political Economy, 2010, Vol. 26, 89-103.
• Apportionment, Fiscal Equalization and Decentralized Tax Enforcement (with Andreas Reutter), Max Planck Institute for Research on Collective Goods, Working Paper 2008-21.
• Tax Evasion and Auditing in a Federal Economy (with Sven Stöwhase), International Tax and Public Finance, 2005, Vol. 12 (4), 515-531.
• Interest Group Formation, Information Transmission and Political Convergence – An Experiment (with Ernesto Reuben and Frans van Winden), work in progress.
• Income Taxation, Enforcement and Occupational Choice (with Rainald Borck), work in progress.

Behavioral Economics

• Reserve prices as reference points – Evidence from auctions for football players at hattrick.org (with Stefan Trautmann, University of Tillburg), March 2009, Journal of Economic Psychology, forthcoming
• Social Norms and the Indirect Evolution of Conditional Cooperation (with Mathias Spichtig, University of Amsterdam), revised version of Munich Discussion Papers in Economics 2007-12, resubmitted to Journal of Economics.
• Name Your Own Price! Micro Evidence from a NYOP Restaurant (with Gerhard Rienner, University of Essex), work in progress. 

Publications

Teaching