Armin Falk

Armin Falk is Professor of Economics at the University of Bonn and director of briq (the Institute on Behavior and Inequality), with additional affiliations as Program Director at IZA, Fellow at CEPR and CESifo, and Research Professor at DIW. His work bridges economics with psychological and biological foundations to enhance explanatory power in economic theory.

Education:

• B.A. equivalent in Philosophy and History, University of Cologne (1991)
• M.A. in Economics, University of Cologne (1994)
• Ph.D. in Economics, University of Zurich (1999)
• Habilitation (Venia Legendi) in Economics, University of Zurich (2003)

Falk's research centers on integrating psychological realism into economic models, investigating how social norms, fairness perceptions, and reciprocity shape labor markets. He pioneers the 'psychology of incentives' framework, demonstrating how trust, social comparison, and intrinsic motivation cause explicit incentives to backfire. His work spans cognitive/non-cognitive skill formation, risk/time/social preferences, and personality-IQ-preference interactions using large-scale experimental and representative data.

Recent publications reveal consistent focus on causal mechanisms in behavioral foundations: gender differences in competitiveness, climate change behavior, self-knowledge limitations, mentoring impacts on education, prosociality development, and childhood inequality. These studies employ randomized interventions and validated measures to isolate psychological drivers of economic decisions across diverse contexts.

Scientific Recognition:

• CEPR Fellow
• CESifo Fellow

Falk advises graduate students in economics while leading major research networks (Identity and Personality, Early Childhood Interventions, Inequality Measurement). His grant-funded projects enable large-scale experimental studies across representative populations. As director of briq and Bonn Econ Lab, he coordinates international teams conducting field experiments on inequality mechanisms.

His laboratory infrastructure supports cutting-edge research on economic preferences through the Bonn Econ Lab, while briq serves as an international hub for behavioral inequality research, hosting scholars studying personality-economics links, childhood interventions, and inequality measurement across 15+ countries.