Uwe Sunde

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.^[8]

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.^[9] They also find that lower cognitive ability is associated with greater risk aversion and more pronounced impatience.^[10] 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.^[11]

In their two most seminal contributions, they explore the measurement, determinants and behavioural consequences of individual risk attitudes (with Jürgen Schupp and Gert Wagner) as well as the transmission of risk and trust attitudes across generations. In the former, 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.^[12] In the latter, 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.^[13] In subsequent work together with Anke Becker and Benjamin Enke, they elicited risk attitudes, time preferences and different measures of prosociality among representative samples in 76 countries.^[14]

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.^[15] 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.^[16] 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.^[17] 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.^[18]

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.^[19] Building upon this theory, Sunde and Cervellati further explore how life expectancy affects economic growth in the situation of a demographic transition^[20] and how delays in demographic development explain comparative development across the world.^[21] In related work, they investigate the role of the rise in life expectancy for the secular expansion of education and the secular decline in lifetime labor supply.^[22]

In related work, Uwe Sunde has investigated the mechanisms of institutional dynamics and democratization,^[23][24] as well as the determinants of democratic attitudes.^[25]

• Webpage of Uwe Sunde on the website of LMU
• Personal website
• Profile of Uwe Sunde on the website of the CESifo Group