Uwe Sunde

Last updated

Uwe Sunde (born in Garmisch-Partenkirchen on May 29, 1973) [1] is a German economist and currently Professor of Economics at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich (LMU) as well as a Research Professor in the ifo Center for Labour and Demographic Economics. [2] Sunde's research interests include long-term development and growth, political economy, labour economics, population economics, and behavioural economics. [3] In 2015, his research on risk preferences and on the role of life expectancy and human capital for long-term economic development earned him the Gossen Prize. [4]

Contents

Biography

A native of Garmisch-Partenkirchen, Uwe Sunde spent his undergraduate and postgraduate studies at Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich (LMU) and University of Warwick (as Erasmus exchange), and earned a diploma in economics in 1998. Thereafter, he participated in the European Doctoral Program at the Pompeu Fabra University and University of Bonn, receiving his Ph.D. from the latter in 2003.

After earning his Ph.D., Sunde worked as a research associate and later as a postdoctoral researcher at the Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA) and the Bonn Graduate School of Economics (2003–2008), at the end of which he earned his habilitation from the University of Bonn. He then moved to the University of St. Gallen, where he held the positions of Professor of Macroeconomics and Director of the Swiss Institute for Empirical Economic Research (SEW-HSG). Having returned to Germany in 2012, Uwe Sunde has been a professor of economics at the LMU ever since then. In parallel, Sunde is affiliated with the ifo Center for Labour and Demographic Economics and the DIW Berlin as a research professor and with the Centre for Economic Policy Research (CEPR) and IZA as a research fellow.

In terms of professional activities, he is member of the Councils for Population Economics, for Macroeconomics and for Organization Economics within the German Economic Association, on whose Extended Board he sat in 2015/16, chairs the Survey Committee of the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP), and participates in the selection of the recipients of the Humboldt Research Awards within the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. Moreover, he performs editorial duties for the academic journals Economic Policy and Journal of the Economics of Aging and has edited the Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization as well as Applied Economics Quarterly in the past. Finally, he has also been in the past a member of the Executive Board of the European Association of Labour Economists (EALE), an extramural fellow at the University of Maastricht, and a coordinator of IZA's Guest and Visitors Programme. [5]

Research

Uwe Sunde's research interests include long-term development and human capital formation, labour economics, population economics, and behavioural economics. According to IDEAS/RePEc, Sunde ranks among the top 2% of highest cited economists worldwide. [6]

Research on risk attitudes

One major area of Sunde's research concerns individuals' risk attitudes, which he has extensively explored with Armin Falk, Thomas Dohmen and David Huffman. Together with Holger Bonin, they find that risk averse individuals sort themselves into occupations with low earnings risk, independently of where they live (in Germany), what gender they are or what their previous labour market experience was. [7] They also find that lower cognitive ability is associated with greater risk aversion and more pronounced impatience. [8] Another accomplishment of their research in cooperation with David A. Jaeger and Holger Bonin has been to provide direct evidence for the hypothesis that individuals who are less risk averse are more likely to migrate. [9] In their two most seminal contributions, they explore the transmission of risk and trust attitudes across generations and (with Jürgen Schupp and Gert Wagner) the measurement, determinants and behavioural consequences of individual risk attitudes. In the former, they find that the transmission across others of risk and trust attitudes depends on (i) the transmission of attitudes from parents to children, (ii) the attitudes prevailing in the local environment, and individuals' tendency to mate with partners with similar attitudes. Additionally, the transmission process is strongly affected by socialization, which itself is reinforced by parental characteristics and aspects of family structure. [10] In the latter, they find that asking individuals to rate their "general" willingness to take risk on a scale from 1 to 10 yields the best all-round predictor of risky behaviour, which significantly depends on individuals' gender, age, height and parental background. [11]

Research on neuroeconomics and reciprocity

In parallel, Sunde, Falk and Dohmen have also researched other aspects of behavioural economics, including neuroeconomics and reciprocity. In neuroeconomics, together with Klaus Fliessbach, Christian E. Elger and Bernd Weber, they find that social comparison affects reward-related brain activity in the human ventral striatum. [12] Furthermore, this activation in the ventral striatum increases in absolute income and - for a given level of absolute income - decreases in lower relative income in both men and women. Similarly, they find that the mere outperforming of the other subject positively affects this reward-related brain area. [13] In their research on reciprocity, Sunde, Dohmen, Falk and Huffman find that most people say that they will respond in kind to positive or negative actions, though with wide differences in the degree of trust and reciprocity. Whereas trust and negative reciprocity are negatively correlated, trust and positive reciprocity are only weakly correlated, with women and the elderly having on average stronger positive and weaker negative reciprocal tendencies. [14] Finally, in another study, they find evidence that reciprocity affects labour market outcomes, with positive reciprocity being associated with higher wages and higher work effort, whereas negative reciprocity is correlated with reduced effort and an increased likelihood of being unemployed. [15]

Research on population economics

Together with Matteo Cervellati, Uwe Sunde has developed a theory of economic development based on the idea of a positive feedback loop between longevity and human capital that is triggered by endogenous skill-biased technological change. Therein, skill-biased technological change helps to increase the time over which individuals reap returns on their human capital by expanding longevity and thus allows to compensate for the initially prohibitively high cost of human capital formation. As a result, an economy transitions from underdevelopment to sustained growth. [16] Building upon this theory, Sunde and Cervellati further explore how life expectancy affects economic growth in the situation of a demographic transition. [17]

Related Research Articles

The term Homo economicus, or economic man, is the portrayal of humans as agents who are consistently rational and narrowly self-interested, and who pursue their subjectively defined ends optimally. It is a wordplay on Homo sapiens, used in some economic theories and in pedagogy.

Behavioral economics is the study of the psychological, cognitive, emotional, cultural and social factors involved in the decisions of individuals or institutions, and how these decisions deviate from those implied by classical economic theory.

In economics, time preference is the current relative valuation placed on receiving a good or some cash at an earlier date compared with receiving it at a later date.

In cultural anthropology, reciprocity refers to the non-market exchange of goods or labour ranging from direct barter to forms of gift exchange where a return is eventually expected as in the exchange of birthday gifts. It is thus distinct from the true gift, where no return is expected.

Personnel economics has been defined as "the application of economic and mathematical approaches and econometric and statistical methods to traditional questions in human resources management". It is an area of applied micro labor economics, but there are a few key distinctions. One distinction, not always clearcut, is that studies in personnel economics deal with the personnel management within firms, and thus internal labor markets, while those in labor economics deal with labor markets as such, whether external or internal. In addition, personnel economics deals with issues related to both managerial-supervisory and non-supervisory workers.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Christopher A. Pissarides</span> British-Cypriot economist

Sir Christopher Antoniou Pissarides is a Cypriot economist. He is Regius Professor of Economics at the London School of Economics, and Professor of European Studies at the University of Cyprus. His research focuses on macroeconomics, labour economics, economic growth, and economic policy. In 2010, along with Peter Diamond and Dale Mortensen, he received the Nobel Prize in Economics, "for their analysis of markets with theory of search frictions."

In decision theory and economics, ambiguity aversion is a preference for known risks over unknown risks. An ambiguity-averse individual would rather choose an alternative where the probability distribution of the outcomes is known over one where the probabilities are unknown. This behavior was first introduced through the Ellsberg paradox.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Richard Blundell</span> British economist (born 1952)

Sir Richard William Blundell CBE FBA is a British economist and econometrician.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Armin Falk</span> German economist (born 1968)

Armin Falk is a German economist. He has held a chair at the University of Bonn since 2003.

Homo reciprocans, or reciprocating human, is the concept in some economic theories of humans as cooperative actors who are motivated by improving their environment through positive reciprocity or negative reciprocity, even in situations without foreseeable benefit for themselves.

In psychology, economics and philosophy, preference is a technical term usually used in relation to choosing between alternatives. For example, someone prefers A over B if they would rather choose A than B. Preferences are central to decision theory because of this relation to behavior. Some methods such as Ordinal Priority Approach use preference relation for decision-making. As connative states, they are closely related to desires. The difference between the two is that desires are directed at one object while preferences concern a comparison between two alternatives, of which one is preferred to the other.

Social preferences describe the human tendency to not only care about one's own material payoff, but also the reference group's payoff or/and the intention that leads to the payoff. Social preferences are studied extensively in behavioral and experimental economics and social psychology. Types of social preferences include altruism, fairness, reciprocity, and inequity aversion. The field of economics originally assumed that humans were rational economic actors, and as it became apparent that this was not the case, the field began to change. The research of social preferences in economics started with lab experiments in 1980, where experimental economists found subjects' behavior deviated systematically from self-interest behavior in economic games such as ultimatum game and dictator game. These experimental findings then inspired various new economic models to characterize agent's altruism, fairness and reciprocity concern between 1990 and 2010. More recently, there are growing amounts of field experiments that study the shaping of social preference and its applications throughout society.

Alison L. Booth is an Australian labour economist and novelist who is professor of economics at the Australian National University. She is the author of six novels. These are Stillwater Creek (2010), The Indigo Sky (2011), A Distant Land (2012), A Perfect Marriage (2018), The Philosopher's Daughters (2020) and The Painting (2021).

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Ludger Wößmann</span> German economist

Ludger Wößmann is a German economist and professor of economics at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich (LMU). Moreover, being one of the world's foremost education economists, he is the director of the ifo Center for the Economics of Education at the ifo Institute. Beyond the economics of education, his research interests also include economic growth and economic history. In 2014, Wößmann's empirical research on the effects of education and his corresponding contribution to public debate were awarded the Gossen Prize, followed by the Gustav Stolper Prize in 2017.

Urs Fischbacher is a Swiss economist and professor of applied economic research at the University of Konstanz. He is director of the Thurgau Economic Institute, an affiliated institute of the University of Konstanz. He pioneered the field of software tools for experimental economics.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Yann Algan</span> French economist

Yann Algan is a French economist, Associate Dean of Pre-experience Programs and Professor of Economics at HEC Paris. He was previously and until 2021 a Professor of Economics of Sciences Po, where he was dean of the School of Public Affairs. His research interests include the digital economy, social capital and well-being. In 2009, Yann Algan was awarded the Prize of the Best Young Economist of France for his contributions to economics in France.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Pierre Cahuc</span> French economist

Pierre Cahuc is a French economist who currently works as Professor of Economics at Sciences Po. He is Program Director for the IZA Institute of Labor Economics's programme "Labour Markets" and research fellow at CEPR. His research focuses mainly on labour economics and its relationship with macroeconomics. In 2001, he was awarded the Prize of the Best Young Economist of France for his contributions to economic research. He belongs to the most highly cited economists in France and Europe's leading labour economists.

Lisa Cameron is an Australian economist currently working as a Professional Research Fellow at the Melbourne Institute of Applied Economic and Social Research at the University of Melbourne.

The gift-exchange game, also commonly known as the gift exchange dilemma, is a common economic game introduced by George Akerlof and Janet Yellen to model reciprocacy in labor relations. The gift-exchange game simulates a labor-management relationship execution problem in the principal-agent problem in labor economics. The simplest form of the game involves two players – an employee and an employer. The employer first decides whether they should award a higher salary to the employee. The employee then decides whether to reciprocate with a higher level of effort due to the salary increase or not. Like trust games, gift-exchange games are used to study reciprocity for human subject research in social psychology and economics. If the employer pays extra salary and the employee puts in extra effort, then both players are better off than otherwise. The relationship between an investor and an investee has been investigated as the same type of a game.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Andries de Grip</span> Economist (Maastricht University)

Andries de Grip is a Dutch economist, academic, and author. He is a Professor of Economics at the Research Centre for Education and the Labour Market (ROA), School of Business and Economics (SBE), Maastricht University and has been Director of ROA from 2013 to 2020.

References

  1. ↑ Curriculum Vitae of Uwe Sunde from the website of the LMU (status: January 2018). Retrieved March 18th, 2018.
  2. ↑ Webpage of Uwe Sunde on the website of the LMU. Retrieved March 18th, 2018.
  3. ↑ Curriculum vitae of Uwe Sunde on the website of the LMU (status: January 2018). Retrieved March 18th, 2018.
  4. ↑ "IZA Fellow Uwe Sunde wins prestigious Gossen Prize | IZA Newsroom". newsroom.iza.org. Retrieved 2018-03-18.
  5. ↑ Curriculum vitae of Uwe Sunde on the website of the LMU (status: January 2018). Retrieved March 18th, 2018.
  6. ↑ Ranking of economists registered on IDEAS/RePEc. Retrieved March 18th, 2018.
  7. ↑ Bonin, Holger; Dohmen, Thomas; Falk, Armin; Huffman, David; Sunde, Uwe (2007). "Cross-sectional earnings risk and occupational sorting: The role of risk attitudes". Labour Economics. 14 (6): 926–937. doi:10.1016/j.labeco.2007.06.007.
  8. ↑ Dohmen, Thomas; Falk, Armin; Huffman, David; Sunde, Uwe (2010). "Are Risk Aversion and Impatience Related to Cognitive Ability?". American Economic Review. 100 (3): 1238–1260. doi:10.1257/aer.100.3.1238.
  9. ↑ Jaeger, David A.; Dohmen, Thomas; Falk, Armin; Huffman, David; Sunde, Uwe; Bonin, Holger (2010). "Direct Evidence on Risk Attitudes and Migration". The Review of Economics and Statistics. 92 (3): 684–689. doi:10.1162/REST_a_00020.
  10. ↑ Dohmen, Thomas; Falk, Armin; Huffman, David; Sunde, Uwe (2012). "The Intergenerational Transmission of Risk and Trust Attitudes". The Review of Economic Studies. 79 (2): 645–677. doi:10.1093/restud/rdr027.
  11. ↑ Dohmen, Thomas; Falk, Armin; Huffman, David; Sunde, Uwe; Schupp, Jürgen; Wagner, Gert G. (2011). "Individual Risk Attitudes: Measurement, Determinants, And Behavioral Consequences". Journal of the European Economic Association. 9 (3): 522–550.
  12. ↑ Fliessbach, K.; Weber, B.; Trautner, P.; Dohmen, T.; Sunde, U.; Elger, C. E.; Falk, A. (2007). "Social Comparison Affects Reward-Related Brain Activity in the Human Ventral Striatum". Science. 318 (5854): 1305–1308. Bibcode:2007Sci...318.1305F. doi:10.1126/science.1145876. PMID   18033886.
  13. ↑ Dohmen, Thomas; Falk, Armin; Fliessbach, Klaus; Sunde, Uwe; Weber, Bernd (2011). "Relative versus absolute income, joy of winning, and gender: Brain imaging evidence". Journal of Public Economics. 95 (3–4): 279–285. doi:10.1016/j.jpubeco.2010.11.025.
  14. ↑ Dohmen, Thomas; Falk, Armin; Huffman, David; Sunde, UWE (2008). "Representative Trust and Reciprocity: Prevalence and Determinants". Economic Inquiry. 46: 84–90. doi:10.1111/j.1465-7295.2007.00082.x.
  15. ↑ Dohmen, Thomas; Falk, Armin; Huffman, David; Sunde, Uwe (2009). "Homo Reciprocans: Survey Evidence on Behavioural Outcomes". Economic Journal. 119 (536): 592–612. doi:10.1111/j.1468-0297.2008.02242.x.
  16. ↑ Cervellati, Matteo; Sunde, Uwe (2005). "Human Capital Formation, Life Expectancy, and the Process of Development". American Economic Review. 95 (5): 1653–1672. doi:10.1257/000282805775014380. PMID   29125727.
  17. ↑ Cervellati, Matteo; Sunde, Uwe (2011). "Life expectancy and economic growth: the role of the demographic transition". Journal of Economic Growth. 16 (2): 99–133. doi:10.1007/s10887-011-9065-2.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.