Julien Senn

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

I am an applied microeconomist, with interests in behavioral economics, political economy, public economics, and labor economics.  My most recent work sheds lights on the determinants of redistributive preferences, on the effects of institutions on norm enforcement and cooperation, and on the effects of social comparisons on 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. Social Preferences and Redistributive Politics  

with Thomas Epper and Ernst Fehr

Accepted at the Review of Economics and Statistics

2. Vaccine Nationalism Counterintuitively Erodes Public Trust in Leaders

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

Psychological Science, 2023

3. 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

4. Social preferences and strategic interactions 

with Ernst Fehr

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

5. Corruption, Punishment and Cooperation [under revision]

with Justin Buffat 

Invited for resubmission @ Games and Economic Behavior 

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

with Jan Schmitz and Christian Zehnder

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

with Thomas Epper and Ernst Fehr  

8. Social Preferences Across Subject Pools: Students vs. General Population

with Thomas Epper and Ernst Fehr

9. Incentivizing Non-routine Interdependent Tasks: Evidence from a Real Effort Experiment 

with Lorenz Goette

10. Beliefs about Inequality and the Nature of Support for Redistribution NEW !!

with Thomas Epper, Ernst Fehr and Aljosha Henkel  

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 Psychological Foundations of Social Preferences 

with Thomas Epper, Ernst Fehr and Aljosha Henkel

4. 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