Ferdinand Vieider heads the Risk and Development Junior Research Unit at the WZB Berlin Social Science Center. Before coming to Berlin, he was an excellence fellow at the University of Munich. He also was a CNRS researcher at Laboratoire GATE, University of Lyon, and worked as a policy consultant for the Climate Policy Initiative. He obtained his PhD in decision theory in 2009 from the Econometric Intitute at the Erasmus University Rotterdam and the Tinbergen Institute. He also holds a master's degree in International Relations from LUISS Guido Carli, Rome, and a Master of Science in Economics from CORIPE Piemonte, Turin. He spent the Fall semester 2007 at the Haas School of Business, University of California, at Berkeley. Ferdinand's main research interest is how preferences, beliefs, and institutional constraints interact in shaping the development prospects of the mostly-rural populations in poor countries.