How do self-employed workers, who constitute a growing share of employment, handle the uncertainty of their income? Unlike payroll employees, self-employed workers can lower prices to increase the chance of earning income at all. I show theoretically how such behavior, self-protection, depends on household income. I then study a welfare reform that exogenously varies household income for a subset of self-employed workers. This allows me to causally identify to what extent self-employed workers trade higher average income for lower but more certain income. My findings shed light on household income inequality and inform the design of insurance for self-employed workers.

This project investigates how people incorporate responsibility in their fairness perceptions when evaluating income inequality. It aims to quantify the relative importance individuals place on two ideals of distributive justice: compensating for circumstances and properly rewarding the exercise of responsibility. The project further investigates how this influences their support for social spending under incomplete information, and their support of inequality-reducing policies in the Netherlands. By linking fairness perceptions under complete and incomplete information to policy preferences, the study offers novel insights into the mechanisms behind public attitudes toward economic inequality and policy design.

Power-hungry, manipulative, narcissistic leaders can have a major negative impact on the performance and well-being of individuals, organizations, even countries, that they lead. This project investigates how the dark sides of someone’s personality-measured as a combination of psychopathy, manipulativeness, and narcissism-affect their willingness to take on leadership positions. The findings of this project can help societies design institutions that encourage those who are better suited to lead to volunteer to take on leadership.

Microfinance Institutions (MFIs) aim to reduce poverty and contribute to economic growth by providing affordable loans to poor individuals via innovative instruments (e.g., group-loans). Despite this promise, MFI interest rates have increased recently due to high operational costs of existing loan products, adding to the stress of poor borrowers. The objective of my research is to provide MFIs with novel and effective group-loan instruments to reduce their operational costs. Re-harnessing social capital’s role in group-loans, the concept that was at the heart of the microfinance revolution in the 1970s, will be the key novelty of my research in revamping microfinance.

Buy-to-let investment has been an important driver of the revival of private rental sectors in developed economies. How is it possible that buy-to-let investors can outbid potential owner-occupiers that prefer home-ownership over renting? This project uses state-of-the-art causal identification methods to study whether borrowing constraints can explain the rise of buy-to-let investment. Borrowing constraints prevent people from spending as much on mortgage payments as on rental payments. This difference gives investors profit opportunities to convert owner-occupied housing into rental housing. This study uncovers whether buy-to-let investors indeed cater to tenants that would be owners in the absence of borrowing constraints.