We investigate how people and places shape one another. Led by Professor Tobias Ebert, our team combines insights from multiple disciplines to understand how people and regions differ, and how these differences shape behavior, well-being, and economic development.
Mission and Approach
We seek to understand how psychological characteristics vary across regions and how these geo-psychological differences shape both individuals and societies. Using large-scale digital and behavioral data, our research aims to uncover how regional psychological differences emerge, how they affect people’s well-being and economic behavior, and how they, in turn, drive macro-level processes such as innovation and technological development.
To achieve this, we use innovative methods to collect large scale data and use state-of-the-art modelling to analyze psychological differences at fine-grained geographic scales. Being psychological in its core, our work is inherently interdisciplinary, also integrating insights from economics, geography, sociology, or computer science. Ultimately, our goal is to better understand the psychological fabric of places and to translate these insights into real-world impact.
Key research projects
- Economic Conditions and Racial Prejudice: A Regional Perspective: In regions with worse economic conditions people tend to report stronger racial prejudice. Nevertheless, several questions remain open about the nature of this regional economy-prejudice link. Which specific economic conditions are driving this relationship? What is the temporal dynamic in changes of economic conditions and racial prejudice levels? To answer these questions, we combine historical regional economic data with geolocated data of experimentally assessed racial prejudice. The project is funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF) with CHF 391’833.
- Personality and Residential Choice: Our personality predicts the environments into which we select ourselves, for example, which situations, social relationships, or jobs we enter. However, people frequently change not only their situations, social relationships, or jobs but also their places of residence. Does our personality also predict the residential contexts into which we select ourselves? To answer this question, we combine large-scale cross-sectional and longitudinal panel data to study actual relocation choices. In addition, we use experiments to identify the processes that drive personality effects in residential choice. The project is funded by the DFG (German Research Foundation) with 231,589 €.
- Fatherhood and Professional Performance: Becoming a father is a major life transition. But how does fatherhood affects men’s immediate and longer-term professional performance. Existing research focuses almost exclusively on mothers or on long-term labor market outcomes for fathers, leaving open key questions about short-term performance dynamics around childbirth. How does performance change immediately after becoming a father, and how do performance trajectories evolve over time? To address these questions, we study fatherhood in a data-rich setting — European professional soccer — by combining ten years of objective performance data with a newly constructed soccer fertility database. Using these data we estimate performance changes around childbirth and their longer-term development. The findings have implications beyond sports, informing debates on parenthood and performance in other high-stakes professions where sustained peak performance is critical. The project is funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF) with CHF 96,656.
Key Collaborators
We work closely with researchers at leading institutions worldwide, such as the University of Cambridge, the University of Mannheim, the University of Helsinki, the Columbia University, the UBC Vancouver, the University of Texas, and the University of Amsterdam.
