20.05.2026

11th Bundesbank-IAW Lecture with Professor Ulrike Malmendier

Professor Ulrike Malmendier, Ph.D., Dr. h.c., of the University of California speaks at Uni Tübingen

Professor Ulrike Malmendier, Ph.D., Dr. h.c., of the University of California, Berkeley, delivered the 11th Bundesbank-IAW Lecture at the University of Tübingen on 7 May 2026. Her lecture was titled “Human Finance: Incorporating Insights from the Life Sciences into Finance, with an Application to German Capital Markets and Pension Reform.”

Professor Malmendier is one of the world’s leading scholars in behavioral economics and has received numerous awards for her research. In her lecture, she showed how economic decisions are shaped not only by laypeople’s but also by experts’ past experiences, such as periods of high inflation or economic depression.

Based on her research, she proposes an early-start pension scheme for Germany. The idea is to familiarize Germany’s traditionally risk-averse population with investing in capital markets from an early age. By encouraging participation in higher-yield savings vehicles, such a scheme could help strengthen the pension system in the long term while also reducing Germany’s comparatively high level of wealth inequality.

The Bundesbank–IAW Lecture at the University of Tübingen invites leading economists to share their perspectives on the future of the European and global economy. The lecture series is jointly organized by the Bundesbank Baden-Württemberg, the Institute for Applied Economic Research (IAW), and the School of Business and Economics at the University of Tübingen.