Research

My research interests are quite varied (hence the degrees in economics and philosophy), including areas such as Ecological (Macro)Economics, Frankfurt School Critical Theory, Comparative Political Economy and Varieties of Capitalism, Post-growth/degrowth, Labor Economics, and Feminist Theory. I’m driven by questions rather than by disciplinary boundaries, and most of these questions circle around the conditions, requirements and challenges of a socio-ecological transition in the face of climate breakdown.

Rather than trying to boil down my research to specific areas, I’d like to present some current research that is in various stages - I hope that this list will give a better idea of what I am currently working on and thinking through. If you are interested in any of these topics, I’m always happy to exchange thoughts!

For already published work, see my list of publications here.

List of current projects (all titles and contents are preliminary)

What’s wrong with the ‘grand gender convergence’? Gender wage gaps, care penalties and essential work in the United States

Although (White) women have increasingly shifted out of low-paid work over the past four decades in the US, female-coded work is still badly paid, despite often being essential. In this article, I use regression and descriptive methodologies to confirm prior literature on pay penalties for nurturant and reproductive care workers. Beyond the relative pay penalty, I show that care jobs are often bad in absolute terms, since a third of all care workers receive lousy wages, as do a quarter of essential care workers. Especially reproductive care jobs are compensated badly, with half of all essential workers in reproductive care receiving lousy wages. I trace changes in the demographic composition of the low-wage workforce, to show that is has become less White and less female over the past four decades. While this has partly driven greater gender equality, I argue greater gender justice only occurs once female-coded care work is recognized (and compensated) for its essential contribution to overall economic activity. A strategy of shifting this type of work to the bottom of the racial and gender division of labor not only fails to promote greater gender justice, but also deepens existing racial injustices. (PhD research, supervised by David Howell)

Carbon emissions, inequality and working hours: A US state-level analysis of the role of Veblen effects in labor supply and emissions

This article contributes to the literature on the link between inequality and emissions in a theoretical framework of social comparison-based utility related to labor supply. Specifically, I investigate potential Veblen effects mediating the relationship between top-end income inequality and carbon emissions via people’s labor supply decisions using US state level data from 1979-2018. I test two different hypotheses: firstly, that higher inequality leads to people working longer hours and secondly, that those longer hours are connected to increased carbon emissions. The results show positive and significant effects for both hypotheses, albeit effect sizes are rather small. While this paper does not argue that labor supply is the main channel through which top-end inequality impacts carbon emissions, it does conclude that labor supply is an important piece of the puzzle to understand this association. (with Till van Treeck, currently under review)

Feminist Ecological Economics

My friend and co-author Corinna Dengler and I are co-editing a volume on Feminist Ecological Economics, to be published Open Access with Routledge in 2027. Feminist Ecological Economics is a strand of heterodox economic thought that emerged in the 1990s at the intersection of feminist economics and ecological economics. The cornerstone of the field was laid in the 1997 Ecological Economics special issue on Women, Ecology and Economics. The editor Ellie Perkins states that the unique starting point of FEE (and all contributions to the SI) is “the unpaid work which is vitally necessary to build and maintain homes, human relationships, and communities – and without which there is no ‘economy’” (Perkins 1997: 105). Although there are by now three special issues/sections in peer-reviewed journals devoted to FEE (1997; 2005; 2018), the field lacks a comprehensive overview. This edited volume brings together diverse voices on FEE: Those of founding mothers as well as those of emerging scholars, from different geographical and (inter- and trans-)disciplinary backgrounds, to sketch the state of the art of the field. (with Corinna Dengler, forthcoming in 2027)

Closing the Economic Gap: A Pluralist Proposal for Critical Theory

This article is a response to Cicerchia’s (2024) article 'Making sense of critical theory’s economic gap'. In her article, Cicerchia argues that part of the problem why current Critical Theory does not have a lot to say about the economy is that it inherited a notion of ‘the economic’ from Max Weber which focuses a lot on instrumental rationality. Since this displaced the 'economy proper' from view, she suggests to turn away from Weber toward Marx. Even though I sympathize with the attempt to broaden the conception of ‘the economic’, I argue that such a move would only fill on alleged gap while opening another. Instead, I therefore argue for a pluralistic account of 'the economy' which includes a conception of it as a site of economic provisioning as well as as a site for economic decision-making. I argue that, while Cicerchia's proposal lends itself to a critical analysis of the former, the focus on instrumental rationality is particularly well-suited to critically analyze the latter. I sketch some directions such an analysis might take, thereby showing that Critical Theory already has the tools at hand to start filling its 'economic gap'.

Playfulness in writing: Feminist writing as Socratic practice

Plato promoted playful writing in philosophy. In today’s academy, the most playful form of writing in fields adjacent to philosophy can arguably found in feminist theory. In this paper, I substantiate these two claims and subsequently explore to what extent contemporary feminist writing thus shows explicit traces of a Socratic conception of philosophy. Overall, I argue that it is especially the focus on (the related concepts of) contextuality and ambiguity that may serve as a fruitful lens to interpret feminist philosophy as Socratic in nature. I illustrate that this may account for the fact that both types of writing—Platonic and feminist—make ample use of ‘movement’ in their metaphors as well as overall writing style, and I ultimately argue that the playful way of writing can be interpreted as creating a consistency between content (their respective epistemologies) and form (their presentation).