About me

Welcome to my website! I am a Professor of Economics at the University of Innsbruck. I graduated in Industrial Engineering from Karlsruhe Institute of Technology and received my Ph.D. in Economics from Free University of Berlin. Prior to joining the Department of Economics at Innsbruck I have held positions as Senior Research Fellow at Max Planck Institute for Tax Law and Public Finance, Munich and as Professor of Economics at Goethe University Frankfurt. In the past years I was a visiting scholar at Columbia University, Cornell University, UC Irvine, and Vanderbilt University, among others, and have been a CESifo Research Network Member since 2011.

My research focuses on questions in the fields of Applied Microeconomics, Public Economics and Political Economy and currently includes projects on the economics of conflict, taxation and redistribution, and internet markets. Usually my work closely combines theory analyses based on methods from game theory with empirical/experimental work in order to study strategic effects and distributional consequences of the design of institutions and public policies. 

Some Recent Papers

High minority power facilitates democratization across ethnic fault lines (with Luke Glowacki and Hannes Rusch), University of Innsbruck Working Papers in Economics and Statistics No. 2023-18.

Alliance formation in regional space: Shifting the battlefront between competing powers (with Kai A. Konrad), Working Paper of the Max Planck Institute for Tax Law and Public Finance No. 2023-15.

Do groups fight more? Experimental evidence on conflict initiation (with Changxia Ke and Sophia Seelos), University of Innsbruck Working Papers in Economics and Statistics No. 2023-16.

Taxation, information acquisition, and trade in decentralized markets: Theory and test (with Tri Vi Dang and Xiaoxi Liu), University of Innsbruck Working Papers in Economics and Statistics No. 2022-08.

Collective action and intra-group conflict with fixed budgets (with Kai A. Konrad), Defence and Peace Economics, 35(1), 2024, pp. 1-23. 

How to preempt attacks in multi-front conflict with limited resources (with Kai A. Konrad), European Journal of Operational Research, 305(1), 2023, pp. 493-500.

Too big to prevail: The paradox of power in coalition formation (with Changxia Ke, Anthony Newell and Lionel Page), Games and Economic Behavior, 135, 2022, pp. 394-410. 

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