Ph.D. Education

At the Center for Law & Economics, Ph.D. students typically have a background in law or a related social science field. They receive a tailor-made education, which often focuses on acquiring methodological knowledge from other social sciences. Areas of recent Ph.D. theses and projects have included intellectual property law, contract law, machine learning & the law, tort law, regulatory design, law & tech, the regulation of disintermediated financial systems, automated decision-making, and judicial behavior (EU, Switzerland and the U.S.).

Former and current external co-advisors and co-examinors include Alessandro Acquisti (Carnegie Mellon), Benjamin Arold (Cambridge), Sam Asher (Imperial), Barton Beebe (NYU), Ryan Bubb (USC), Christopher Buccafusco (Duke), Dan Burk (UC Irvine), Ben Depoorter (UC Hastings), Christoph Engel (Max Planck Institute for Research on Collective Goods, Bonn), Talia Gillis (Columbia), Stuart Graham (Georgia Tech), Isabel Günther (ETH), Dominik Hangartner (ETH), Yoan Hermstrüwer (University of Zurich), Benjamin Lauderdale (LSE), Daniel Markovits (Yale), Florencia Marotta-Wurgler (NYU), Dan Rubinfeld (UC Berkeley), Mrinmaya Sachan (ETH), David Schwartz (Northwestern), Heike Schweitzer (FU Berlin), Holger Spamann (Harvard), Christopher Sprigman (NYU), Marco Tabellini (Harvard), David Tan (National University of Singapore), Florent Thouvenin (University of Zurich), Andreas Vlachos (Cambridge) and Wen Wen (Texas). For more information, please contact Prof. Elliott Ash, Stefan Bechtold or Alexander Stremitzer.

Prof. Stefan Bechtold is further involved in organizing annual law & economics courses for doctoral students at the external page Study Center Gerzensee. The Study Center is a foundation of the Swiss National Bank. For more information, please consult the external page website of the Study Center.