Benjamin Enke

Benjamin Enke is an Assistant Professor of Economics at Harvard University. He received his PhD in Economics from the University of Bonn in 2016. Professor Enke’s primary research interests are behavioral economics, cultural economics, experimental economics, and political economy. He is a faculty Research Fellow at the NBER. One line of Professor Enke’s research focuses on cultural variation in economically relevant domains. For example, he has worked on measuring the global variation in risk, time and social preferences, and on understanding how this heterogeneity emerged and how it is related to economic outcomes. In other work, he has studied how different aspects of human psychology and biology have coevolved to support specific social cooperation systems, or how heterogeneity in moral values impacts US election outcomes. In a second line of work, Professor Enke studies bounded rationality in individual decision-making, in particular the ways in which limited attention and complexity generate systematically biased beliefs and behaviors.