Bruno Frey - Career

Career

Frey studied economics at the University of Basel and at the University of Cambridge, obtaining a doctorate in economics in 1965. In 1969 he was appointed associate professor of economics at the University of Basel. From 1970 to 2010, he was associate professor at the University of Basel. From 1970 to 1977, he was a full professor of public finance at the University of Konstanz in Germany. Frey was appointed as a full professor of economics at the Institute for Empirical Research in Economics (IEW) of the University of Zurich (UZH) in 1977.

His first book, Umweltökonomie (Environmental Economics), was published in Göttingen in 1972. During his career, he has been a prolific author, publishing hundreds of articles in economics as well as in a number of different fields including sociology, political science, and psychology. Some of his work has reached the top journals of the economics profession, such as The Journal of Political Economy and the American Economic Review. He is one of the most cited researchers according to the Institute for Scientific Information (ISI) and one of the most cited authors in economics according to Research Papers in Economics. Since its inception, Frey has been heading the Handelsblatt ranking of researchers at universities in Germany, Austria and Switzerland with respect to their lifework.

Frey was appointed managing editor of Kyklos, a Swiss journal on political economy, in 1969. He maintains that position to this day. Since 2004, he has served as one of four directors of research at the Center for Research in Economics, Management and the Arts (CREMA); besides Reiner Eichenberger (University of Fribourg), René L. Frey and Margit Osterloh (University of Zurich).

In 2004, he was appointed member of the eight-member expert committee of the Copenhagen Consensus, besides four Nobel laureates. The goal consisted in the development of recommendations as to which challenges of humanity (hunger, AIDS, water provision, access to sanitary systems, restrictions on trade, corruption and global warming) to give priority, based on economic cost-benefit analyses.

In July 2011, the University of Zurich decided to set up an ad-hoc commission to investigate allegations of publication misconduct by Frey et al. In October of the same year the commission agreed on a report that found Frey guilty of misconduct. In 2012, the University of Zurich declined to renew his contract.