ACADEMICS

Towards Public Value: (Behavioral) Public Administration / Policy Issues

We can agree that the work of policymakers is to improve the well being of communities with the decisions they make. It should not strike us as something new to think that citizens, judges, policymakers, and basically every one of us, are far from being entirely rational. In this dimension of work, I explore the link between policies and our behavior, as well as concrete issues regarding policy consequences on citizens. How do entrepreneurs react to legal constraints? How did startups face the challenges of the pandemic? Do legal consequences make us more defensives when we formulate policies? Are consumers conscious of international interchange fees that generate enormous burdens for them?

Ongoing Projects:

The Law and Defensive Decision Making

Together with my colleague Florian Artinger, an expert in the field of decision making and behavioral economics, we started studying the effects of legal-formalism (very rigid legal frameworks with tough consequences for those who make mistakes) on government officials' decision making. It is the first time that an experiment is run in order to test for consequences of legalism. We have presented our initial work at the International Research Society for Public Management Conference in 2023. You can find the working paper here:

Does the law fuel defensiveness? An empirical approach to legal-formalism’s implications in public management behavior - Download here.

Sneaky Numbers and Credit Cards: the unexplored world of international fees and their policy implications

Together with two colleagues, we have run a quasi experiment and collected data from hundreds of real credit card transactions carried out abroad. While the credit-card/ finance/ debt literature has addressed the issue of high interchange fees, one hardly finds discussions, let alone explanations of how internatıonal credit card transactıons work and how much consumers unknowingly pay when they are forced to pay in another currency. Our findings point to mark-ups of 1.5 to 4.5%, which, following the Keynesian precautionary motive, banks toss over to the customer, hedging volatility risks while reducing consumer surplus. At the moment, we are developing a microeconomic model that explains this and hope to finish a first draft soon.