Professor Leonhard Lades

Professor in Economics

Economics University of Stirling, Stirling, FK9 4LA

Professor Leonhard Lades

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About me

Leonhard Lades is a Professor of Behavioural and Environmental Economics at the Stirling Management School, the Director of the Stirling Behavioural Science Centre, and the Treasurer of the International Association for Research in Economic Psychology (IAREP).

Before (re-)joining the University of Stirling in 2024, he led the Behavioural Science & Policy Group at the UCD Geary Institute and was an Assistant Professor in Environmental Policy at UCD. He also was an EPA Senior Research Fellow in Behavioural Economics at EnvEcon and a Lecturer (with tenure) in Economics and an Early Career Fellow in Behavioural Science at the University of Stirling. He received his PhD in Economics from the Friedrich-Schiller-University Jena where he was a member of the Evolutionary Economics Group at the Max Planck Institute of Economics.

Leo's research lies at the intersection of behavioural science and environmental policy. His areas of expertise are behavioural public policy, behavioural economics, and economic psychology. He is interested in fostering ethical applications of behavioural insights and has co-developed and applied the nudge FORGOOD ethics framework. He is working on the identification and the removal of behavioural "sludge" particularly when it prevents us from reaching environmental targets. He is interested in how phenomena identified in behavioural economics, such as present bias and context-dependent preferences, can influence environmentally-relevant investments as well as survey responses in stated preference studies. Finally, he explores everyday experiences and behaviours using the day reconstruction method to measure how people feel and behave in their everyday lives in contexts such as the Covid-19 lockdown, media consumption, food consumption, transport, and pro-environmental behaviour.

He previously received third-party funding for the BRIGHT project ("Behavioural Research to Inform Greener Home Transformations" from the Sustainable Energy Authority of Ireland, the ABICAP project ("Assessing Administrative Burdens in Ireland's Climate Action Plan") from the Irish EPA, the networking grant "Establishing the UK/Irish Behavioural Science Network" with University College Dublin and Stirling University from the Royal Society of Edinburgh, and the "Enabling Transition Behavioural Economics Fellowship" also from the Irish EPA.

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