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
• Econometrics
• Law
• Psychology
• Positive economics

Selected publications

• Values as Luxury Goods and Political Behavior

  Journal of the European Economic Association · 2025-03-27 · 4 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract Motivated by novel survey evidence, we develop a theory of political behavior in which the relative weight voters place on values rather than material considerations increases in income. The model unifies several stylized facts about US politics and makes new predictions. The luxury goods idea implies—and two datasets confirm—that rich moral liberals are considerably more likely to vote against their economic interests than poor moral conservatives, cautioning against the common narrative that the working class is particularly politically motivated by values. For sufficiently morally liberal voters, increased income can even reduce the likelihood of voting for Republicans. Rich liberals’ and poor conservatives’ asymmetric priorities also explain why Democrats are internally more heterogeneous than Republicans, and why income and voting Republican are positively correlated across voters but negatively across states. Finally, we interpret the secular partisan realignment of rich moral liberals and poor moral conservatives through our model.

  PublisherDOI

• Complexity and Time

  Journal of the European Economic Association · 2025-02-22 · 5 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract A large literature shows that people’s valuation of delayed financial rewards violates exponential discounting, exhibiting a hyperbolic pattern: high short-run impatience that strongly decreases in the length of the delay. We test the hypothesis that the hyperbolic pattern in measured discount rates over money reflects mistakes driven by the complexity of evaluating delayed payoffs. We document that hyperbolicity (i) is strongly associated with choice inconsistency and cognitive uncertainty, (ii) increases in overt complexity manipulations, and (iii) arises nearly identically in computationally similar tasks that involve no actual payoff delays. Our results suggest that even if people had exponential discount functions, complexity-driven mistakes would cause them to make hyperbolic choices. We examine which experimental techniques to estimate present bias are (not) confounded by information-processing constraints.

  PublisherDOI

• Public communication about science in 68 countries: Global evidence on how people encounter and engage with information about science

  2025-08-27

  articleOpen access

  This 68-country survey (n = 71,922) examines science information diets and communication behavior, identifies cross-country differences, and tests how economic and sociopolitical conditions predict such differences. We find that social media are the most used sources of science information in most countries, except those with democratic-corporatist media systems where news media tend to be used more widely. People in collectivist societies are less outspoken about science in daily life, whereas lower education is associated with higher outspokenness. Limited access to digital media is correlated with participation in public protests on science matters. We discuss implications for future research, policy, and practice.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Perceptions of science, science communication, and climate change attitudes in 68 countries – the TISP dataset

  Scientific Data · 2025-01-20 · 17 citations

  articleOpen access

  Science is integral to society because it can inform individual, government, corporate, and civil society decision-making on issues such as public health, new technologies or climate change. Yet, public distrust and populist sentiment challenge the relationship between science and society. To help researchers analyse the science-society nexus across different geographical and cultural contexts, we undertook a cross-sectional population survey resulting in a dataset of 71,922 participants in 68 countries. The data were collected between November 2022 and August 2023 as part of the global Many Labs study "Trust in Science and Science-Related Populism" (TISP). The questionnaire contained comprehensive measures for individuals' trust in scientists, science-related populist attitudes, perceptions of the role of science in society, science media use and communication behaviour, attitudes to climate change and support for environmental policies, personality traits, political and religious views and demographic characteristics. Here, we describe the dataset, survey materials and psychometric properties of key variables. We encourage researchers to use this unique dataset for global comparative analyses on public perceptions of science and its role in society and policy-making.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• 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 should engage more in society and policymaking. We found variations between and within countries, which we explain with individual- and country-level variables, including political orientation. While there is no widespread lack of trust in scientists, we cannot discount the concern that lack of trust in scientists by even a small minority may affect considerations of scientific evidence in policymaking. These findings have implications for scientists and policymakers seeking to maintain and increase trust in scientists.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Capturing the complexity of human strategic decision-making with machine learning

  Nature Human Behaviour · 2025-06-25 · 3 citations

  article
  PublisherDOI

• Public communication about science in 68 countries: Global evidence on how people encounter information about science and engage with it

  2025-02-21

  preprintOpen access

  This 68-country survey (n = 71,922) examines how people encounter information about science and communicate about it with others, identifies cross-country differences, and tests the extent to which economic and sociopolitical conditions predict such differences. We find that social media are the most used sources of science information in most countries, except those with democratic-corporatist media systems where news media tend to be used more widely. People in collectivist societies are less outspoken about science in daily life, whereas low education is associated with higher outspokenness. Limited access to digital media is correlated with participation in public protests on science matters.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Public Communication about Science in 68 Countries: Global Evidence on How People Encounter and Engage with Information about Science

  Science Communication · 2025-10-21 · 4 citations

  articleOpen access

  This 68-country survey ( n = 71,922) examines science information diets and communication behavior, identifies cross-country differences, and tests how such differences are associated with sociopolitical and economic conditions. We find that social media are the most used sources of science information in most countries, except those with democratic-corporatist media systems where news media tend to be used more widely. People in collectivist societies are less outspoken about science in daily life, whereas lower education is associated with higher outspokenness. Limited access to digital media is correlated with participation in public protests on science matters. We discuss implications for future research, policy, and practice.

  PublisherDOI

• Moral Boundaries

  Annual Review of Economics · 2024-08-22 · 17 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  This article reviews the growing economics literature that studies the politico-economic impacts of heterogeneity in moral boundaries across individuals and cultures. The so-called universalism-versus-particularism cleavage has emerged as a main organizing principle behind various salient features of contemporary political competition, including individual-level and spatial variation in voting, the realignment of rich liberals and poor conservatives, the internal structure of ideology, and the moral content of political messaging. A recurring theme is that the explanatory power of universalism for left-wing policy views and voting is considerably larger than that of traditional economic variables. Looking at the origins of heterogeneity in universalism, an emerging consensus is that cross-group variation is partly economically functional and reflects that morality evolved to support cooperation in economic production. This insight organizes much work on how kinship systems, market exposure, political institutions, and ecology have shaped universalism through their impacts on the relative benefits of localized and impersonal interactions.

  PublisherDOI

• Behavioral Attenuation

  AEA Randomized Controlled Trials · 2024-06-18

  dataset
  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