The Department of Empirical Microeconomics is headed by Mario Mechtel. The research focuses on the field of applied microeconomics. The team is currently working on individual consumption decisions regarding social responsibility and sustainability. Other areas of interest include social identity, labor and personnel economics, political economy and the distributional effects of various energy and climate policy instruments (or, more broadly speaking, public economics in a wider sense). These topics are investigated based on microeconometric methods, laboratory experiments and randomized controlled trials (RCTs).