Team
The team is led by Alexander Hellgardt, professor of civil law at University of Augsburg. Alexander read law and philosophy at the Eberhard-Karls-Universität Tübingen. He passed his First State Exam in Law in 2003 and clerked for the Hanseatic Higher Regional Court Hamburg, to take the Second State Exam in Law in 2008. During this period, he was a research associate for Prof. Dr. Dr. Dr. h.c. mult. Klaus J. Hopt at the Max Planck Institute for Comparative and International Private Law in Hamburg and obtained a PhD in Law also in 2008 from the University of Hamburg. He then moved to the USA to obtain an LLM from Harvard Law School. After returning to Europe, he has joined the team of Prof. Dr. Dr. h. c. Wolfgang Schön at the Max Planck Institute for Tax Law and Public Finance in Munich where he continues to be affiliated until today. In 2015 he has obtained his Habilitation at the Ludwig Maximilians University Munich. He held an interim professorship at Ludwig Maximilians University Munich and from 2017 until 2024 he held the Chair of Private Law, Corporate Law and Jurisprudence at the University of Regensburg. Since October 2024 he holds the Chair of Private Law at the University of Augsburg. He has visited the Oxford Faculty of Law in 2012 and 2022. Not to take sides on the famous feud, he also visited the Faculty of Law at the University of Cambridge in 2016.
Dominik Schmidt studied Economics at the University of Innsbruck with a focus on microeconomic fields, particularly game theory, together with behavioural economics and experimental economics. In his dissertation, he investigated the effects of insider trading regulation and traders’ preferences toward it conducting experiments. As a Postdoctoral Researcher at the University of Augsburg, he contributes his expertise in experimental methods to study, among other topics, information aggregation in financial markets and decision-making under uncertainty.
Joanna Tyrowicz provides the team with her experience in empirical, quantitative research, both with observational data and obtained through controlled experiments. She has degrees from Katholieke Universiteit Leuven and University of Warsaw.
Research Associates and Student Assistants
Johannes studied Law at the University of Regensburg and successfully passed the First State Examination. He is most interested in the steering effects of capital market regulation.
Franziska Mayer studies social sciences at The University of Augsburg. She is interested in how laws can transform our society and help it become a better version of itself.
With a background in science and a research interest, Asiri Ratnayake has a curiosity for new ideas.