Julien Senn

I am a Senior Research Associate at the Department of Economics at the University of Zurich.  

My interests are in behavioral economics, political economy, public economics, and labor economics.  My most recent work sheds lights on topics such as the determinants of distributional preferences, and the effects of social comparisons for productivity and stress.  

I study these topics using state-of-the-art experimental methods, large-scale surveys with nationally representative samples, and administrative or historical data.

For Bachelor and Master students writing a thesis with me, please read these guidelines. 

Publications and completed working papers

1. Beliefs about Inequality and the Nature of Support for Redistribution 

with Thomas Epper, Ernst Fehr and Aljosha Henkel  

Journal of Public Economics, Accepted

2. Do Monetary Incentives Matter for Identifying Social Preferences? [Registered Report]

with Thomas Epper, Ernst Fehr and Aljosha Henkel

Experimental Economics, Conditionally Accepted

3. Social Preferences and Redistributive Politics  

with Thomas Epper and Ernst Fehr

Review of Economics and Statistics, forthcoming

4. Incentivizing Interdependent Tasks: Evidence from a Real Effort Experiment 

with Lorenz Goette

Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization, 2024

5. Vaccine Nationalism Counterintuitively Erodes Public Trust in Leaders

with Clara Colombatto, Jim Everett, Michel Maréchal and Molly Crockett 

Psychological Science, 2023

6. Moral dilemmas and trust in leaders during a global health crisis 

with Everett, J.A.C., Colombatto, Maréchal, M.A., Crockett, M.J., et al.

Nature Human Behavior, 2021

7. Social preferences and strategic interactions 

with Ernst Fehr

One Hundred Years of Game Theory, Cambridge University Press, forthcoming 

8. Leveraging Social Comparisons: The Role of Peer Assignment Policies

with Jan Schmitz and Christian Zehnder

Revise and Resubmit @ Journal of the European Economic Association

9. The Fundamental Properties, Stability, and Predictive Power of Distributional Preferences  

with Thomas Epper and Ernst Fehr  

Reject and Resubmit @ Econometrica

10. The Distributional Preferences of Students and the General Population

with Thomas Epper and Ernst Fehr

Revise and Resubmit @ Journal of Political Economy : Micro

This paper supersedes the older draft "Social Preferences Across Subject Pools: Students vs. General Population" 

11. Corruption, Punishment and Cooperation

with Justin Buffat 

Selected work in progress

1. Who deserves a tax break and why? 

with Krishna Srinivasan

2. Competition and Immoral Behavior: Evidence from Economic Aryanization during WW2 

with Juha Tolvanen and Stephanos Vlachos

3. The right to be Heard: An RCT on Economizing Procedural Justice

with Andreas Beerli, Lorenz Biberstein, Martin Killias, Michel Maréchal and Nora Markwalder

4. The Psychological Foundations of Social Preferences 

with Thomas Epper, Ernst Fehr and Aljosha Henkel

5. Who are the meritocrats?

with Thomas Epper and Ernst Fehr

Resting papers

Myopic loss aversion, the endowment effect for risk and the limits of expectation-based reference-dependent preferences (2015)

Testing the Speed of Adjustment of the Reference Point in Models of Expectation-Based Reference Points (2015)

with Justin Buffat