Malte Dold

Malte Dold joins us as Associate Professor of Economics. Prior to Barnard, he held Assistant and
Associate Professor positions at Pomona College. He holds an MA in Philosophy and Economics
(University of Bayreuth) and a PhD in Economics (University of Freiburg).

Malte’s research lies at the intersection of behavioral economics, philosophy of economics, and the
history of economic thought. He is especially drawn to the ethical and psychological questions that
were once central to economics but became marginalized by its self-image as a positivistic science.
His history-of-thought work focuses on political economists who saw economic theory as shot
through with value-laden assumptions and who regarded understanding the many quirks of the
human psyche as central to policy advice.

He is working on two books: Mind as Error Correction: An Alternative to the Biases Paradigm in
Psychological Economics, co-authored with Mario Rizzo (NYU), and Amartya Sen on Liberalism
and Liberal Modernity, funded by the German Federal Ministry of Research. Other projects ask why
welfare state redistribution can be in everyone’s interest; how market-oriented economies should
respond to climate change; and what two very different Nobel laureates in economics, James
Buchanan and Amartya Sen, can teach us about freedom and public discourse in modern societies.
Malte is an editor of Behavioral Public Policy; his work has appeared in Games and Economic
Behavior, the Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization, the Journal of Economic
Methodology, and the Cambridge Journal of Economics. At Barnard, he teaches Theoretical
Foundations of Political Economy.