Nicola Fuchs-Schündeln has been awarded the Gossen Prize

German economics association “Verein für Socialpolitik” honors Frankfurt economist

Nicola Fuchs-Schündeln, Professor of Macroeconomics and Development at Goethe University Frankfurt’s House of Finance, has been awarded the Gossen Prize 2016. The economist (44) received the most important German economics award during the annual meeting of the Verein für Socialpolitik in Augsburg on Monday evening. The Gossen Prize is awarded every year to a German speaking economist who has gained international reputation for his or her research. The most important criterion are publications in internationally renowned research journals.

Monika Schnitzer, Chair of the Verein für Socialpolitik, acknowledged in her laudatory speech the significant empirical research contributions of Nicola Fuchs-Schündeln in the areas of political economics, economics of household decisions and development economics.Nicola Fuchs-Schündeln investigates mainly the behavior of private households with respect to consumption, savings and labor supply as well as the endogeneity of preferences. Her work has been published i. a. in the American Economic Review, the Quarterly Journal of Economics and Science.

Since 2009, Fuchs-Schündeln holds a chair at Goethe University where she also contributes to the Cluster of Excellence “The Formation of Normative Orders” as a Principal Investigator and to the Research Center “Sustainable Architecture for Finance in Europe” (SAFE) as a Program Director. The past twelve months she spend at Stanford University, California, as a guest professor. In 2010, Fuchs-Schündeln received a starting grant of the European Research Council, one of the most important scientific awards in the European Union. Before coming to Frankfurt she held positions at the universities of Harvard and Yale in the U.S.

The award, which is endowed with 10,000 euros, is named after the Prussian lawyer Hermann Heinrich Gossen (1810–1858). Although hardly noticed at that time due to its mathematical nature, his book “Die Entwicklung der Gesetze des menschlichen Verkehrs, und der daraus fließenden Regeln für menschliches Handeln” (“The Development of the Laws of Human Interaction and the Resulting Rules of Human Behavior”) has prepared the ground for modern marginalist theory.