Henning Hermes

Henning Hermes is a Postdoctoral Researcher and Deputy Director at the Ludwig Erhard ifo Center for Social Market Economy and Institutional Economics at the Ifo Institute Munich. He is affiliated with the FAIR Center of Excellence at NHH Bergen, Düsseldorf Institute for Competition Economics (DICE), IZA, CEPR, and the HCEO Network. His research focuses on behavioral and experimental economics, with a specialization in labor economics, education, and inequality. He studies human capital development, preference formation, and scalable interventions to improve outcomes for disadvantaged children. His work combines field, lab, and survey experiments to explore topics like early childcare access, paternalistic decision-making, and gender norms. Hermes holds Diplomas (equivalent to BSc + MSc) in Economics and Psychology from the University of Mainz and completed a PhD there under supervision by Daniel Schunk and Ernst Fehr. He is a guest editor at the European Economic Review for a Special Issue on “Field Experiments to Reduce Inequality” and co-organizes the Workshop on Field Experiments in Economics and Business.

Education:

• PhD in Economics, University of Mainz (supervised by Daniel Schunk and Ernst Fehr)
• Diploma (BSc + MSc) in Economics and Psychology, University of Mainz
• Apprenticeship as a bank clerk

Research Interests:

• Experimental and Behavioral Economics
• Early Childhood Development
• Paternalistic Preferences
• Socioeconomic Inequality
• Field Experiments in Education and Labor Markets
• Policy Design and Behavioral Barriers

Key Contributions:

• Work on childcare access disparities and their impact on maternal labor supply and gender equality
• Studies on the causal effects of working memory and self-regulation training
• Examination of discrimination in universal social programs (e.g., childcare applications)

Awards:

• Winner of the CIDER Public Science Award 2022 (3rd place)

Advising and Grants:

• Supervised PhD/MA students: None explicitly listed
• Grants: Not explicitly detailed in provided text

Labs/Teams:

• Ludwig Erhard ifo Center for Social Market Economy
• FAIR Excellence Cluster (NHH Bergen)
• CIDER (College for Interdisciplinary Educational Research)