I am a Lecturer (Assistant Professor) in the Department of Economics, University of Exeter. My other affiliations include: research associate at Harvard University’s Culture, Cognition, Coevolution Lab, and affiliate fellow at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business’s Stigler Center. I hold a PhD in economics from the University of Zurich.
I study how culture and institutions shape economic and political development — and how they are, in turn, reshaped by markets, migration, and crises. My work combines large-scale historical data (newspapers, censuses, patents) with field experiments, spanning political economy, economic development, economic history, and cultural evolution.
My research has been published in the Journal of Political Economy and is forthcoming in the Journal of the European Economic Association. Some of my earlier work appeared under my former name, Max Winkler.
Recent
- Jul 2026 “The Political Economy of Propaganda” (with Sebastian Ottinger) accepted at the Journal of the European Economic Association. PDF
- Apr 2026 “How Cultural Diversity Drives Innovation” is out in the Journal of Political Economy, 134(4). PDF
- Jul 2025 “Doux Commerce” (with Tzachi Raz) featured on Marginal Revolution.
Upcoming talks
- 17–18 Sep 2026 Stigler Center Affiliate Fellows Conference, Chicago Booth
- 24–25 Sep 2026 12th WZB Conference on Migration and Diversity, Berlin
- 26 Sep 2026 ASREC Europe Conference, Venice