The Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF) has awarded research grants to two Affiliated Professors at the UBS Center for Economics in Society. Maya Eden and Andreas I. Mueller, both members of the Department of Economics at the University of Zurich, will each lead four-year projects beginning in 2026, with a combined budget of over CHF 1.25 million. Their research addresses foundational questions in normative economics and one of the most persistent labor market challenges of our time.

Non-Consequentialist Approaches to Normative Economics

Maya Eden has been awarded an SNSF grant of CHF 782,282 for her project “Non-Consequentialist Approaches to Normative Economics.” Starting in 2026 and running for four years, the project develops new normative frameworks for economic policy analysis that take non-consequentialist ethics seriously.

Most economic policy analysis rests on a simple idea: choose the action that leads to the best possible outcome. This consequentialist approach has dominated normative economics for decades – not because philosophers agree it is the right way to think about ethics, but because it is mathematically convenient. Recent work has made clear that consequentialism has real limits. Some ethical considerations – individual rights, fairness of procedures, transparency – resist being reduced to a simple ranking of outcomes. And attempts to incorporate them into the consequentialist framework have run into formal inconsistencies.

At the core of Eden's project is a simple observation: the fact that consequentialism is the dominant approach in economics reflects a historical path of least resistance, not a philosophical consensus. Broadening the toolkit available to normative economists is both intellectually overdue and practically important. Questions about how to weigh individual rights against aggregate welfare, how to evaluate policies that shape people's preferences, and how to think about obligations to future generations all resist clean answers within the standard framework. By developing richer normative tools, the project aims to put policy analysis on firmer ethical foundations – and to open a more productive dialogue between economists and philosophers working on some of the most consequential questions of our time.

Eden’s research lies at the intersection of economics and moral philosophy. She is known for her work on normative economics, social choice, and the ethical evaluation of public policy.

The Persistence of Gender Gaps in Pay and Participation: A Macroeconomic Analysis

Andreas I. Mueller has been awarded an SNSF grant of CHF 471,422 for his project "The Persistence of Gender Gaps in Pay and Participation: A Macroeconomic Analysis." The four-year project, also starting in 2026, sets out to explain why women in most advanced economies still earn less than men and participate less in the labor force – and what policies might actually help.

The project takes a comprehensive cross-country approach. Using harmonized data from a broad range of developed nations, the research team will track how men and women move in and out of employment and switch jobs over time, identifying patterns that national studies alone can miss. One key innovation is the construction of a new "job amenity index" – a tool to measure not just wages, but the full bundle of features a job offers: flexibility, remote-work options, physical demands, job stability, and parental leave. The goal is to understand whether women and men systematically sort into different types of jobs, and whether that sorting reflects genuine preferences, social norms, or structural constraints.

The researchers will then build a formal economic model capturing how workers search for jobs, how wages are negotiated, and how factors like career interruptions and potential discrimination interact to produce the gaps we observe. The model will be estimated separately for multiple countries, allowing direct comparisons and simulations of specific policy levers, including equal pay mandates, minimum wage rules, childcare subsidies, and workplace amenity regulations.

The project's ambition is to move beyond documenting that gender gaps exist toward understanding precisely why they persist and which policy interventions are best placed to close them.

Mueller is a macroeconomist whose research focuses on labor markets, unemployment, and the dynamics of job search.

Together, these two SNSF grants reflect the depth and range of research at Zurich's Department of Economics, from the philosophical foundations of policy analysis to the empirical study of labor market inequality.