Welcome!
I am a PhD candidate in Economics at the University of Mannheim, Department of Economics. I am interested in how ownership and financial markets affect real world outcomes in competitive markets, legal systems, and insurance.
My advisors in Mannheim are Volker Nocke (Department of Economics) and Ernst Maug (Department of Finance).
News
I am on the job market in 2026/27.
In November 2026, I will be joining the Market-Based Finance Division at the European Central Bank as a PhD Trainee.
I am co-organising the BCFM PhD Conference 2026.
Working Papers
► Public Markets for Litigation Finance (JMP) -- Paper Slides
Presenting at AFA 2027 Poster Session, EEA Annual Congress 2026 and EALE Conference 2026 (selection)
We study emerging public markets for legal cases and how they affect financing decisions and settlement bargaining. We provide a theoretical model in which a risk-averse plaintiff sells a share of case proceeds to risk-averse and informed investors, and subsequently engages in bargaining with a defendant. In both public and private markets, financing induces a legal friction by reducing the plaintiff’s exposure to trial risk, strengthening his bargaining position and making court trial more likely. Its strategic use induces a financial friction. The plaintiff anticipates the commitment benefit and sells more than efficient risk sharing would justify, which strengthens commitment and further enhances the legal friction. In public markets, prices add information but need not foster agreement. A sufficiently informative public price may in fact increase trial incidence relative to private financing and can induce the plaintiff to sell a larger share. An optimal regulatory cap maximizing the litigants' joint welfare is always binding below the efficient risk benchmark.
Work in Progress
► Shareholder Reallocation around Merger Voting: A Common Ownership Perspective
Recent theories on shareholder democracy predict that shareholders reallocate based on their preferences on the expected outcome of the vote. Taking a common ownership perspective, we investigate whether shareholders benefiting from a merger through their positions in industry competitors increase their ownership before an approval vote, and vice versa. Leveraging a regression discontinuity design, we find that hedge funds and mutual funds increase their ownership in the acquirer by 0.6 pp per $100M in combined abnormal returns to horizontal competitors. With such trading, shareholder approval becomes disconnected from the acquirer's gains and thereby systematically less informative to competition authorities. Moreover, we document vote avoidance behavior among managers whose active owners are also exposed to competitors.
► Loss-Portfolio-Transfers in Reinsurance Markets