âś‹ Hi!

Hi, I’m Sannah — a third-year Economics PhD student at the Vienna University of Economics and Business (WU Vienna).

My research interests lie in applied and behavioral microeconomics, with a strong focus on political and crime economics.

More specifically, I focus on the market for sex work. I study how gender inequalities shape the different segment of the market and how this relate to human trafficking. Building on this, I investigate how stigma and factual knowledge influence legal status preference more broadly, using sex work as a case study of how moral attitudes can shape regulation. The second strand focuses on political bias in media content: how it arises, how it can be measured, and what it means for the information people receive.

Research

Work in Progress

Could Sex Work Be Legal? Facts and Stigma (with F. Braccioli)

Abstract

We study preferences over sex-work regulation using a pre-registered survey experiment with approximately 6,000 U.S. respondents. We first document four new descriptive facts: 1. preferences are not polarized between prohibition and full legalization, respondents favor intermediate regimes; 2. public support for legalizing the market is underestimated; 3. factual, social and moral beliefs correlate with legal status preferences. We expose respondents to research-based information about decriminalization or to narratives designed to alter stigma toward sex workers. Information reduces support for criminalization more consistently than the destigmatizing narrative. The two targeted components nevertheless interact: information improves factual knowledge and reduces stigma, while the destigmatizing narrative reduces all four dimensions of stigma and produces a smaller improvement in knowledge. Neither intervention changes second-order beliefs about public support.

Exploiting Inequalities: The Gender Pay Gap’s Role in the Sex Work Market

Trauma and Risk: The Hidden Cost of Sexual Violence (with M. Heinze & S. HeĂź )

Fact-checking Online and Offline (with C. Louis-Sidois)

Teaching

What’s Next:

October 2026: I will be visiting the Independent Research Group “Behavioral Economics of Crime and Conflict” at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Crime, Security and Law.

Random fact:

I pass my free time rescuing books trapped in bookstores.