Nora Szech

Obituary

Nora Szech was one of the outstanding academic members of her generation and quickly earned an international reputation with many highly regarded research contributions. Her research focused on behavioral economics, experimental economics, and market design.
After studying mathematics and economics at the University of Bonn and a brief interlude in investment banking, Nora completed her PhD at the Bonn Graduate School of Economics in 2010. Only two years later she accepted a call for a full professorship at the University of Bamberg before moving to a professorship of Political Economy at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology. 

Nora is best known for her research on the interaction of markets and morality. She co-authored a pioneering paper published in Science in 2012 that suggests that market interaction may reduce moral behavior. This paper has sparked a lively and sometimes controversial academic discussion and inspired an entire literature that is rapidly growing and to which she herself contributed in follow-up studies. She also published on issues of mechanism design, diversity, political participation and citizen engagement, animal welfare, and health economics. During the Covid pandemic she spoke out on how to incentivize people to get vaccinated. 

The empirical validity and the practical and political relevance of her research were always very important to Nora. She regularly spoke out in the media and engaged actively in public discussions.

Nora has been a member of the CESifo research network since 2014. She received numerous academic awards, including the dissertation prize of University of Bonn, the Reinhard Selten Award, and several teaching awards both in Bonn and Karlsruhe. These awards reflect her enthusiasm for her work and her ability to inspire others. She was an exceptionally popular colleague and an inspiration to all who knew her. She will be deeply missed. Our sympathy goes to her family and relatives.

Klaus Schmidt, LMU Munich

Ernst Fehr, University of Zurich

Clemens Fuest, CESifo President