Empirical Microeconomics

The Department of Empirical Microeconomics is headed by Mario Mechtel. The research focuses on the field of applied microeconomics. The team is currently working on individual consumption decisions regarding social responsibility and sustainability. Other areas of interest include social identity, labor and personnel economics, political economy and the distributional effects of various energy and climate policy instruments (or, more broadly speaking, public economics in a wider sense). These topics are investigated based on microeconometric methods, laboratory experiments and randomized controlled trials (RCTs).

Mario Mechtel's work has been published in prestigious international peer-reviewed journals, including Economic Journal, European Economic Review, Experimental Economics, Energy Economics, Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, and PNAS.

The department is part of the Research Cluster Behavioral Economics and Societal Transformation in Lower Saxony (“Wissenschaftsraum Verhaltensökonomik und gesellschaftliche Transformation”). Since 2009, Mario Mechtel is the head organizer of the Workshop on Microeconomics. Mario Mechtel heads the Leuphana Interdisciplinary Behavioral Research Laboratory together with David Loschelder and Jacob Hörisch.