Dr Max Posch

I am a Lecturer (Assistant Professor) in Economics at the University of Exeter Business School, which I joined in 2022. I study how culture and institutions shape economic and political development, and how they are in turn reshaped by markets, migration and crises. My work combines large-scale historical data (newspapers, censuses, patents) with field experiments, spanning political economy, economic development, economic history and cultural evolution.

My research has been published in the Journal of Political Economy and is forthcoming in the Journal of the European Economic Association. I am co-principal investigator, with Michael Muthukrishna, on "Collective Brains", a John Templeton Foundation grant (2027–2030). Some of my earlier work appeared under my former name, Max Winkler.

I am also a research associate at Harvard University's Culture, Cognition, Coevolution Lab and an affiliate fellow at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business's Stigler Center. I hold a PhD in economics from the University of Zurich and was a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard University from 2020 to 2022.