Christian Zünd

PhD Candidate

University of Zurich

Christian Zünd wants to know why we behave the way we do.

I’m a PhD candidate in Economics at the University of Zurich. My research combines field and online experiments with data from large administrative databases and genetic repositories. My work has been published in Science and Nature Genetics and has recently received quite a bit of media attention.

CV

Curriculum Vitae

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Education

PhD Economics, Zurich

Visiting PhD Student, Oxford (2018)

MPhil Econ. Research, Cambridge (2014)

BA Economics, Zurich (2013)

Interests

Applied Microeconomics
Field Experiments
Behavioral Genetics
Machine learning
Data, Data, Data!

Scholarships: Dissertation Fellowship, University of Zurich (2019), SNF Doc.Mobility Fellowship, Swiss National Science Fund (2018), Excellence Scholarship, Excellence Foundation EFZH (2014), Cambridge Trust Scholarship, Cambridge Trust, (declined, 2014).

Additional Training: RSF Summer Institute in Behavioral Economics (2018), SINTEF Winter School in Practical Artificial Intelligence (2018), RSF Summer Institute in Social Science Genomics (2017), ETH-Zurich courses in Bioinformatics, Functional Genomics, and Cancer Genetics (2016-18).

It's Not All About the Money: How Corruption Undermines Policy Effectiveness

–Job Market Paper–
Using a novel identification strategy and large administrative data, I show that the causal effect of Brasil’s Bolsa Família on school enrollment is significantly smaller in municipalities where corruption is rampant. Local corruption increases income underreporting during the registration phase of the program, making it harder to target the families that benefit most, consistent with the evidence of a theoretical model and a field experiment.

Job Market Paper (2019) It's Not All About the Money: How Corruption Undermines Policy Effectiveness. PDF

Civic Honesty Around The Globe

with Alain Cohn, Michel André Maréchal, and David Tannenbaum

Field experiment on civic behavior in 40 countries, 355 cities, and involving over 17’000 apparently lost wallets.

Science (2019) Civic honesty around the globe. PDF Dataset

Genes, Pubs, and Drinks

with Pietro Biroli

–Work in progress–
Gene-environment correlation and gene-environment interaction for alcohol consumption using data on more than 400’000 individuals and 60’000 pubs in the UK.

DIAL Podcast

Risk GWAS

with the Social Science Genetic Association Consortium

Genome-wide association study of risk tolerance in over 1 million individuals.

Nature Genetics (2019) Genome-wide association analyses of risk tolerance and risky behaviors in over 1 million individuals identify hundreds of loci and shared genetic influences. PDF

Times Daily Mail USNews GenomeWeb WebMD

Recent Publications

Alain Cohn, Michel André Maréchal, David Tannenbaum, Christian Lukas Zünd

January, 2019 Science

Civic honesty around the globe

Civic honesty is essential to social capital and economic development but is often in conflict with material self-interest. We examine the trade-off between honesty and self-interest using field experiments in 355 cities spanning 40 countries around the globe. In these experiments, we turned in more than 17,000 lost wallets containing varying amounts of money at public and private institutions and measured whether recipients contacted the owners to return the wallets. In virtually all countries, citizens were more likely to return wallets that contained more money. Neither nonexperts nor professional economists were able to predict this result. Additional data suggest that our main findings can be explained by a combination of altruistic concerns and an aversion to viewing oneself as a thief, both of which increase with the material benefits of dishonesty.

Richard Karlsson Linnér et al.

January, 2019 Nature Genetics

Genome-wide association analyses of risk tolerance and risky behaviors in over 1 million individuals identify hundreds of loci and shared genetic influences

Humans vary substantially in their willingness to take risks. In a combined sample of over 1 million individuals, we conducted genome-wide association studies (GWAS) of general risk tolerance, adventurousness, and risky behaviors in the driving, drinking, smoking, and sexual domains. Across all GWAS, we identified hundreds of associated loci, including 99 loci associated with general risk tolerance. We report evidence of substantial shared genetic influences across risk tolerance and the risky behaviors: 46 of the 99 general risk tolerance loci contain a lead SNP for at least one of our other GWAS, and general risk tolerance is genetically correlated (r_g ~ 0.25 to 0.50) with a range of risky behaviors. Bioinformatics analyses imply that genes near SNPs associated with general risk tolerance are highly expressed in brain tissues and point to a role for glutamatergic and GABAergic neurotransmission. We found no evidence of enrichment for genes previously hypothesized to relate to risk tolerance.

Christian Zünd

PhD Candidate

University of Zurich

Bio

CV

Education

Interests

It's Not All About the Money: How Corruption Undermines Policy Effectiveness

Civic Honesty Around The Globe

Genes, Pubs, and Drinks

Risk GWAS

Recent Publications

Civic honesty around the globe

Genome-wide association analyses of risk tolerance and risky behaviors in over 1 million individuals identify hundreds of loci and shared genetic influences

R

R/Bio

stata

python

pytorch

tensorflow

keras

numpy

scipy

scikit

matlab

aws

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