21.05.2026
Tübingen Reloaded: Insights with Microeconomist Dr. Giacomo Brusco
In this series, we invite research alumni, who returned to the University of Tübingen on a Tübingen Reloaded grant, to reflect on their experiences by responding to 10 short prompts. Learn what inspires their research and how they experienced their return to Tübingen.
The most underrated thing about being an economist is…
…how much time you spend thinking carefully about seemingly simple questions. The hard part isn’t the maths. It’s working out what the right question actually is.
When friends ask me for financial advice at dinner parties, I…
…tell them to start saving when they are young, put their money in indexed funds, and forget about it until they retire.
If people understood this one thing about taxes, the world would be…
…a better place: if people realized a simple fact that we teach in all introductory microeconomics courses around the world: prices usually adjust after tax changes, meaning that who legally pays a tax is often very different from who actually ends up bearing the cost. For example, if a tax is placed on gasoline companies, fuel prices at the pump may rise, so drivers end up paying much of the tax.
A research result that genuinely surprised me was…
…while I was in Tübingen I ran a randomized control trial in Rome to measure how much of the gains from tax evasion seem to be passed on to consumers. We expected at least some sharing, but found essentially none, which was very surprising to me.
One economic myth I would be happy to see disappear is…
…that “you can just tax firms.” In practice, taxes get passed through prices, wages, and profits in ways that are often very far from what policymakers and the public intend. It is always someone and not something that ultimately bears the burden of a tax.
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