This policy-relevant research project, in collaboration with the University of Oldenburg, aimed to study the social, political and motivational drivers of public employment hiring and joining decisions in the German states.
Its main goal was to use Lab-in-the-Field Experiments to study subject pool effects in the orientation of business administration as compared to public administration students towards social norms such as altruism, fairness, trustworthiness, as well as towards free-riding and risk aversion.
These experimental data was used to test a wide range of hypotheses regarding the predictive power of public service motivation theories and to develop the micro-foundations of public employee-specific behaviour and attitudes.