Economics: University of Erlangen-Nuremberg

BGPE - Bavarian Graduate Programme in Economics

The theory of incentives incorporates many active research areas, be they theoretical, empirical or applied to real institutions and markets. Since the 1980s microeconomic research has been dominated by incentive economics. This became apparent when George Akerlof, Michael Spence and Joseph Stiglitz were awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics for their contributions to the research area of information economics. Today the concepts of incentive economics (contract theory, information economics, institutional economics) are important in nearly all research areas of economics. The graduate programme is aimed at further developing the theory of incentive economics in order to test hypotheses empirically, and to generate policy relevant results (i.e. incentive mechanisms in labour markets, incentive based structure of managers' salaries).