Benjamin Enke

About

Benjamin Enke is an Associate Professor at Harvard's Department of Economics and a Faculty Research Fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER). He earned his Ph.D. in Economics from the University of Bonn in 2016. His research primarily focuses on experimental, behavioral, cultural, and political economics, exploring how these areas intersect and influence economic decision-making and outcomes.

Research topics

• Computer Science
• Sociology
• Economics
• Mathematics
• Artificial Intelligence
• Political Science
• Statistics
• Epistemology
• Cognitive psychology
• Social psychology

Selected publications

• Trust in scientists and their role in society across 68 countries

  Nature Human Behaviour · 2025-01-20 · 208 citations

  articleOpen access

  Science is crucial for evidence-based decision-making. Public trust in scientists can help decision makers act on the basis of the best available evidence, especially during crises. However, in recent years the epistemic authority of science has been challenged, causing concerns about low public trust in scientists. We interrogated these concerns with a preregistered 68-country survey of 71,922 respondents and found that in most countries, most people trust scientists and agree that scientists s…

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• What You See Is All There Is*

  The Quarterly Journal of Economics · 2020 · 188 citations

  1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract News reports and communication are inherently constrained by space, time, and attention. As a result, news sources often condition the decision of whether to share a piece of information on the similarity between the signal and the prior belief of the audience, which generates a sample selection problem. This article experimentally studies how people form beliefs in these contexts, in particular the mechanisms behind errors in statistical reasoning. I document that a substantial fractio…

  DOI

• Moral Values and Voting

  Journal of Political Economy · 2020 · 173 citations

  1st authorCorresponding

  This paper studies the supply of and demand for moral values in recent US presidential elections. Using a combination of large-scale survey data and text analyses, I find support for the hypothesis that both voters and politicians exhibit heterogeneity in their emphasis on universalist relative to communal moral values and that politicians’ vote shares partly reflect the extent to which their moral appeal matches the values of the electorate. Over the last decade, Americans’ values have become i…

  DOI

• Associative memory, beliefs and market interactions

  Journal of Financial Economics · 2024-05-07 · 44 citations

  articleOpen access1st author

  Recent theories and narratives highlight the potential role of associative recall in driving overreaction in expectations and market behavior. Based on a simple model, we test this idea through a series of experiments in which news are communicated with memorable contexts. Because the experimental participants predominantly remember those past news that get cued by new information, their beliefs about fundamentals strongly overreact. In a betting market experiment, associative recall translates…

  PublisherDOI

• Universalism: Global Evidence

  American Economic Review · 2024-12-30 · 29 citations

  article

  This paper leverages nationally representative surveys across 60 countries and 64,000 respondents to present novel stylized facts about the relationship-specific nature of altruism. Across individuals, universalist preferences systematically vary with demographics such as age and religiosity and are predictive of many left-wing political views, albeit in culturally highly heterogeneous ways. Across countries, universalism is strongly linked to a broader radius of trust. Looking at origins, unive…

  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Armin Falk

  BRIQ Institute on Behavior and Inequality

  65 shared

• Paola Giuliano

  51 shared

• Yiming Cao

  Boston University

  39 shared

• Nathan Nunn

  39 shared

• Florian Zimmermann

  University of Wuppertal

  29 shared

• Uwe Sunde

  Institut für Urheber- und Medienrecht

  21 shared

• Thomas Dohmen

  20 shared

• David Huffman

  16 shared

Labs

• Benjamin EnkePI

Education

• Ph.D., Economics

  Harvard University

  2013

• B.A., Economics

  University of California, Berkeley

  2007

Similar researchers at Harvard University

• Andrei Shleiferh-200
• Alberto Alesinah-161
• John Y. Campbellh-132