No.
15
2025
Building Bridges to the Future
A tribute to Kaspar Villiger’s legacy
Economic challenges of our time
From rising inequality and global trade tensions to climate change and the impact of artificial intelligence on labor markets – economists today are grappling with fundamental questions that will shape our collective future. In this special edition of the Public Paper series, all affiliated professors of the UBS Center share their perspectives on these challenges. Their contributions highlight how cutting-edge research conducted at the Department of Economics at the University of Zurich can help us better understand – and potentially solve – some of the most urgent issues of our time.
It is precisely this ambition that defines the UBS Center for Economics in Society. Since its founding, the Center has served as a platform for dialogue between academia, business, and policymakers and as a catalyst for excellence in economic research. That vision goes back to Kaspar Villiger. As the founding Chairman of the Foundation Council, he played a pivotal role in establishing and shaping the UBS Center.
With this fifteenth edition of the Public Paper series, we honor Kaspar Villiger’s extraordinary contributions and legacy. By strengthening research capacity at the University of Zurich and fostering public dialogue around key societal questions, his vision continues to inspire the Center’s mission: bridging knowledge and society to build a better future.
From rising inequality and global trade tensions to climate change and the impact of artificial intelligence on labor markets – economists today are grappling with fundamental questions that will shape our collective future. In this special edition of the Public Paper series, all affiliated professors of the UBS Center share their perspectives on these challenges. Their contributions highlight how cutting-edge research conducted at the Department of Economics at the University of Zurich can help us better understand – and potentially solve – some of the most urgent issues of our time.
It is precisely this ambition that defines the UBS Center for Economics in Society. Since its founding, the Center has served as a platform for dialogue between academia, business, and policymakers and as a catalyst for excellence in economic research. That vision goes back to Kaspar Villiger. As the founding Chairman of the Foundation Council, he played a pivotal role in establishing and shaping the UBS Center.
Connecting knowledge with society
The founding of the UBS Center in 2012 was a crucial step in shaping the future of economic sciences at the University of Zurich. Kaspar Villiger, as a cofounder and driving force, had a clear vision: science, business, and politics must work together constructively – not only to advance research but also to address pressing societal challenges. The UBS Center was created to bring this vision to life, serving as a platform for worldclass research while fostering continuous exchange between academia and practice. Villiger saw this initiative as an opportunity to strengthen economic research at the University of Zurich and position Switzerland as a global leader in the field.
His longstanding commitment and leadership are honored in this special edition through personal tributes by Ernst Fehr, Michael Hengartner, and Sergio P. Ermotti – three voices that underscore the profound and lasting impact of Kaspar Villiger’s vision.
The founding of the UBS Center in 2012 was a crucial step in shaping the future of economic sciences at the University of Zurich. Kaspar Villiger, as a cofounder and driving force, had a clear vision: science, business, and politics must work together constructively – not only to advance research but also to address pressing societal challenges. The UBS Center was created to bring this vision to life, serving as a platform for worldclass research while fostering continuous exchange between academia and practice. Villiger saw this initiative as an opportunity to strengthen economic research at the University of Zurich and position Switzerland as a global leader in the field.
His longstanding commitment and leadership are honored in this special edition through personal tributes by Ernst Fehr, Michael Hengartner, and Sergio P. Ermotti – three voices that underscore the profound and lasting impact of Kaspar Villiger’s vision.
Kaspar Villiger was appointed Honorary President of the UBS Foundation of Economics in Society at the Annual Dinner on March 11, 2025. This distinction recognizes his visionary leadership and profound contributions in shaping both the foundation and the UBS Center.
Enabling world-class research
How should we tax capital in an age of growing inequality? What does it take to make AI a tool for inclusion rather than division? Can green industrial policies truly drive the climate transition – or are they just disguised protectionism? These are just some of the questions at the heart of today’s global challenges – and at the core of current research conducted by affiliated professors at the UBS Center.
In this special edition of the Public Paper, they explore the most pressing issues in their respective fields: from poverty traps and structural transformation in the Global South to wage inequality, misinformation, and the rise of economic nationalism. Their contributions reflect the breadth of academic inquiry at the Department of Economics at the University of Zurich – ranging from behavioral economics and development to trade, taxation, and the ethics of policymaking. Taken together, these perspectives offer more than snapshots of academic expertise: they provide evidence-based insights into the forces shaping our future. And they demonstrate how economics can help address some of the most urgent questions facing society today.
How should we tax capital in an age of growing inequality? What does it take to make AI a tool for inclusion rather than division? Can green industrial policies truly drive the climate transition – or are they just disguised protectionism? These are just some of the questions at the heart of today’s global challenges – and at the core of current research conducted by affiliated professors at the UBS Center.
In this special edition of the Public Paper, they explore the most pressing issues in their respective fields: from poverty traps and structural transformation in the Global South to wage inequality, misinformation, and the rise of economic nationalism. Their contributions reflect the breadth of academic inquiry at the Department of Economics at the University of Zurich – ranging from behavioral economics and development to trade, taxation, and the ethics of policymaking. Taken together, these perspectives offer more than snapshots of academic expertise: they provide evidence-based insights into the forces shaping our future. And they demonstrate how economics can help address some of the most urgent questions facing society today.
Kistefos Museum, Norway / Patrik Bloudek via Unsplash
Explore fields
Sandro Ambühl Behavioral Economics 3.0: Navigating real-world decision-making
Lorenzo Casaburi Unlocking development through evidence-based research
David Dorn Globalization, automation, and the future of work
Maya Eden Exploring the ethics of population and individual rights
Ernst Fehr Uncovering the forces shaping human behavior: a different perspective
David Hémous The role of green innovation in shaping future economies
Andreas I. Mueller The forces driving labor market inequality: challenges and solutions
Ralph Ossa Global trade: key challenges and the future of the WTO
Dina Pomeranz Challenges in development economics: taxation and climate change
Florian Scheuer Redesigning tax systems for fairness and growth
Affiliated professors
Behavioral economics can help policymakers make better decisions, but only if we understand the biases at play.
Behavioral Economics 3.0: Navigating real-world decision-making
Sandro Ambühl
Understanding how to foster a transformation of the agricultural sector while safeguarding the welfare of millions of smallholders is a crucial and difficult question for the next decades.
Unlocking development through evidence-based research
Lorenzo Casaburi
Why workers struggled so much to adapt to globalization remains a puzzle.
Globalization, automation, and the future of work
David Dorn
I believe that utilitarianism is ill-suited to address many of the complex policy issues we currently face.
Exploring the ethics of population and individual rights
Maya Eden
It is crucial that we understand how economic and cultural environments influence people’s preferences and personality development.
Uncovering the forces shaping human behavior: a different perspective
Ernst Fehr
Our work on technological change in the environmental context provides support for policies that favor green R&D and carbon taxation mechanisms.
The role of green innovation in shaping future economies
David Hémous
Unemployment represents a massive unused resource in modern market economies.
The forces driving labor market inequality: challenges and solutions
Andreas I. Mueller
Trade remains part of the solution, not the problem.
Global trade: key challenges and the future of the WTO
Ralph Ossa
The better our data and methodologies, the more nuanced the ways in which we identify what works and why.
Challenges in development economics: taxation and climate change
Dina Pomeranz
The public debate about taxing the rich remains contentious because there is still an enormous disparity in views about whether top earners are good or bad for the economy.
Redesigning tax systems for fairness and growth
Florian Scheuer
What we consider normal today – rising incomes, technological advancement, and improved living standards – is, in historical terms, an anomaly.
How growth emerged from stagnation: exploring the roots of economic progress
Hans-Joachim Voth
Whether it is improving corporate governance, shaping public policy, or refining educational approaches, insights from behavioral economics can inform meaningful change.
Exploring morality: challenges and insights in economic research
Roberto Weber
The real challenge is not just ensuring AI adoption in developing regions but determining whether it will empower these economies or deepen existing inequalities.
Unlocking solutions – how AI can transform poverty and inequality
David Yanagizawa-Drott
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Authors
Professor of Economics, Affiliated Professor at the UBS Center
Ernst Fehr received his doctorate from the University of Vienna in 1986. His work has shown how social motives shape the cooperation, negotiations and coordination among actors and how this affects the functioning of incentives, markets and organisations. His work identifies important conditions under which cooperation flourishes and breaks down. The work on the psychological foundations of incentives informs us about the merits and the limits of financial incentives for the compensation of employees. In other work he has shown the importance of corporate culture for the performance of firms. In more recent work he shows how social motives affect how people vote on issues related to the redistribution of incomes and how differences in people’s intrinsic patience is related to wealth inequality. His work has found large resonance inside and outside academia with more than 100’000 Google Scholar citations and his work has been mentioned many times in international and national newspapers.
UBS Foundation Assistant Professor of Behavioral Economics of Financial Markets
UBS Foundation Associate Professor of Development Economics
Lorenzo Casaburi is UBS Foundation Associate Professor of Development Economics at the Department of Economics, University of Zurich. His main line of research focuses on agricultural markets in Sub-Saharan Africa, with an emphasis on market structure, behavioral insights, and agricultural finance. He also works on state capacity, with an emphasis on tax enforcement and redistribution policies. For his research, he has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC Starting Grant), the Swiss National Foundation (Eccellenza Grant), USAID, and DFID, among others. Lorenzo holds a B.A. from the University of Bologna and a Ph.D. in Economics from Harvard. Before joining Zurich, he was a postdoc at Stanford SIEPR. He is a Research Fellow at CEPR and a Research Affiliate at BREAD, IGC, IPA, and J-PAL.
UBS Foundation Professor of Globalization and Labor Markets
David Dorn is the UBS Foundation Professor of Globalization and Labor Markets at the University of Zurich and the director of the university-wide interdisciplinary research priority program “Equality of Opportunity.” He was previously a tenured associate professor at CEMFI in Madrid, a visiting professor at the University of California in Berkeley, and a visiting professor at Harvard University.Professor Dorn’s research spans the fields of labor economics, international trade, economic geography, macroeconomics, and political economy. He published influential studies on the impacts of globalization and technological innovation on labor markets and society. David Dorn is among the 100 most highly cited economists worldwide in the last decade. In 2023, he was awarded the Hermann Heinrich Gossen Prize for the most accomplished economist in German-speaking countries under the age of 45.
Professor of Economics, Affiliated Professor at the UBS Center
Maya Eden joined the Department of Economics at the University of Zurich as Professor of Economics in July 2024. She earned her Ph.D. in Economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 2011. Following her doctoral studies, she spent six years as an economist in the Macroeconomics and Growth Team of the Development Economics Research Group at the World Bank. In 2017, she transitioned to academia as an Assistant Professor of Economics at Brandeis University, where she was promoted to Associate Professor in 2022. Prof. Eden is affiliated with the Center for Economic Policy Research (CEPR). She co-organizes the Virtual Seminar Series on Normative Economics and Economic Policy, serves as an Associate Editor of the Review of Economic Dynamics and a Co-Editor at Economics and Philosophy.
UBS Foundation Associate Professor of Economics of Innovation and Entrepreneurship
David Hémous received his PhD from Harvard University in 2012. He is a macroeconomist working on economic growth, climate change and inequality. His work highlights that innovation responds to economic incentives and that public policies should be designed taking this dependence into account. In particular, he has shown in the context of climate change policy that innovations in the car industry respond to gas prices and that global and regional climate policies should support clean innovation to efficiently reduce CO2 emissions. His work on technological change and income distribution shows that higher labor costs lead to more automation, and that the recent increase in labor income inequality and in the capital share can be explained by a secular increase in automation. He has also shown that innovation affects top income shares. He was awarded an ERC Starting Grant on 'Automation and Income Distribution – a Quantitative Assessment' and he received the 2022 'European Award for Researchers in Environmental Economics under the Age of Forty'.
Professor of Macroeconomics and Labor Markets, Affiliated Professor at the UBS Center
Prof Mueller’s research spans a broad spectrum of issues in macroeconomics, labor economics, and monetary economics and has been published in leading academic journals such as the American Economic Review, Econometrica, the Journal of Political Economy and the Review of Economic Studies and covered in the Economist, New York Times, Wall Street Journal and Financial Times. He is a Faculty Research Associate at NBER, a Research Affiliate at CEPR, a Research Fellow at IZA, an Associate Editor at the Swiss Journal of Economics and Statistics (SJES) and an Associate Editor at the Journal of Monetary Economics (JME). Prior to joining the University of Zurich, he was an Associate Professor at the Department of Economics at UT Austin and at Columbia Business School. Prof. Mueller received his doctorate from the IIES, Stockholm University, and was awarded the Arnbergska Prize for his dissertation work by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.
UBS Foundation Professor of Economics
Ralph Ossa, who served as Chief Economist of the World Trade Organization (WTO) from January 2023 to June 2025, took up the UBS Foundation Professorship of Economics at the Department of Economics of the University of Zurich (UZH) as of July 1, 2025. Before joining the WTO, Ralph Ossa was already teaching and conducting research at UZH in the field of international economics, with a particular focus on policy-relevant questions. He was chairman of the Department of Economics from 2019 to 2022 and coeditor of the Journal of International Economics from 2016 to 2022. Prior to Zurich, he was on the faculty at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business. He holds a PhD in Economics from the London School of Economics.
UBS Foundation Associate Professor of Applied Economics
Dina Pomeranz received her PhD from Harvard in 2010. Prior to joining the University of Zurich, she was an assistant professor at Harvard Business School and a Post-Doctoral Fellow at MIT's Poverty Action Lab. Her research focuses on developing countries, in particular on public finance, taxation, public procurement and firm development. Taking state-capacity research to the field, she works closely with the governments in Chile, Ecuador and Kenya to analyze strategies to strengthen public finance capabilities, and measure the impacts on government agencies, citizens and firms. Her work has been published in academic journals including the American Economic Review, the American Economic Journal - Applied Economics, and the Journal of Economic Development. In 2017, she was awarded one of the highly competitive ERC Starting Grants for her research on tax evasion and the role of firm networks. In 2018, she received the Excellence Prize in Applied Development Research of the “Verein für Socialpolitik”, was named as one of the top 10 most influential economists in Switzerland by a consortium of Swiss newspapers and was elected to the Council of the European Economic Association for a 5-year term.
UBS Foundation Professor of Economics of Institutions
Florian Scheuer received his PhD from MIT in 2010. He is interested in the policy implications of rising inequality, with a focus on tax policy. In particular, he has worked on incorporating important features of real-world labor markets into the design of optimal income and wealth taxes. These include economies with rent-seeking, superstar effects or an important entrepreneurial sector, frictional financial markets, as well as political constraints on tax policy and the resulting inequality. His work has been published in the American Economic Review, the Journal of Political Economy, the Quarterly Journal of Economics and the Review of Economic Studies, among other journals. In 2017, he received an ERC starting grant for his research on “Inequality - Public Policy and Political Economy.” Before joining Zurich, he was on the faculty at Stanford, held visiting positions at Harvard and UC Berkeley and was a National Fellow at the Hoover Institution. He is Co-Editor of Theoretical Economics and Member of the Board of Editors of the Review of Economic Studies. He is also a Co-Director of the working group on Macro Public Finance at the NBER. He has commented on tax policy in various US and Swiss media outlets.
UBS Foundation Professor of Macroeconomics and Financial Markets
Joachim Voth received his PhD from Oxford in 1996. He works on financial crises, long-run growth, as well as on the origins of political extremism. He has examined public debt dynamics and bank lending to the first serial defaulter in history, analysed risk-taking behaviour by lenders as a result of personal shocks, and the investor performance during speculative bubbles. Joachim has also examined the deep historical roots of anti-Semitism, showing that the same cities where pogroms occurred in the Middle Age also persecuted Jews more in the 1930s; he has analyzed the extent to which schooling can create radical racial stereotypes over the long run, and how dense social networks (“social capital”) facilitated the spread of the Nazi party. In his work on long-run growth, he has investigated the effects of fertility restriction, the role of warfare, and the importance of state capacity. Joachim has published more than 80 academic articles and 3 academic books, 5 trade books and more than 50 newspaper columns, op-eds and book reviews. His research has been highlighted in The Economist, the Financial Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Guardian, El Pais, Vanguardia, La Repubblica, the Frankfurter Allgemeine, NZZ, der Standard, der Spiegel, CNN, RTN, Swiss and German TV and radio.
UBS Foundation Professor of the Economics of Corporate Culture, Business Ethics and Social Responsibility
Roberto A. Weber is Professor for the Economics of Corporate Culture, Business Ethics and Social Responsibility at the Department of Economics and the Director of the Zurich Graduate School of Economics at the University of Zurich. He was previously a Full Professor of Social and Decision Sciences at Carnegie Mellon University. Weber received his doctorate from the California Institute of Technology. Prof. Weber is a CESifo Research Network Fellow and a Department Editor for Behavioral Economics and Decision Analysis at Management Science. He has published extensively on topics such as ethical behavior, social responsibility, leadership and economic decision-making in leading journals across economics, political science, psychology and management. In 2023, his commitment to supervising and supporting students was honored with the UZH Mentoring Award, an accolade based on nominations by young researchers at the University of Zurich.
Professor of Development and Emerging Markets, Affiliated Professor at the UBS Center
David Yanagizawa-Drott received his PhD from IIES at Stockholm University in 2010. At that point, he was hired as Assistant Professor at John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University. He was then promoted to Associate Professor in 2014. In 2016, he was hired as a full professor at University of Zürich. His research has shown that propaganda can cause violent conflict, studying the impact of hate media during the Rwanda Genocide. David has also examined the role of political protests in shaping policy outcomes and elections, establishing evidence that they can be highly effective in moving public opinion. In developing countries, a lot of his work focuses on the how to improve health outcomes and economic outcomes for poor households. In this line of work, for example, David implemented a randomized field experiment that showed that a simple Community Health Worker intervention in Uganda, based on a social entrepreneurship model, reduced child mortality by more than twenty percent. David is a member of several research networks, such as Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL), The Bureau for Research and Economic Analysis of Development (BREAD), European Development Research Network (EUDN) and Center for Economic Policy Research (CEPR). His work has been highlighted in various international media outlets, such as the New York Times, Washington Post, The Guardian, The Economist and various national TV news broadcasts in the U.S.
Management
Professor of Economics, Affiliated Professor at the UBS Center
Ernst Fehr received his doctorate from the University of Vienna in 1986. His work has shown how social motives shape the cooperation, negotiations and coordination among actors and how this affects the functioning of incentives, markets and organisations. His work identifies important conditions under which cooperation flourishes and breaks down. The work on the psychological foundations of incentives informs us about the merits and the limits of financial incentives for the compensation of employees. In other work he has shown the importance of corporate culture for the performance of firms. In more recent work he shows how social motives affect how people vote on issues related to the redistribution of incomes and how differences in people’s intrinsic patience is related to wealth inequality. His work has found large resonance inside and outside academia with more than 100’000 Google Scholar citations and his work has been mentioned many times in international and national newspapers.
UBS Foundation Assistant Professor of Behavioral Economics of Financial Markets