[3] In 2015, his research on risk preferences and on the role of life expectancy and human capital for long-term economic development earned him the Gossen Prize.
He then moved to the University of St. Gallen, where he held the positions of Professor of Macroeconomics and Director of the Swiss Institute for Empirical Economic Research (SEW-HSG).
Finally, he has also been in the past a member of the Executive Board of the European Association of Labour Economists (EALE), an extramural fellow at the University of Maastricht, and a coordinator of IZA's Guest and Visitors Programme.
[8] One major area of Sunde's research concerns individuals' risk attitudes, which he has extensively explored with Armin Falk, Thomas Dohmen and David Huffman.
[10] Another accomplishment of their research in cooperation with David A. Jaeger and Holger Bonin has been to provide direct evidence for the hypothesis that individuals who are less risk averse are more likely to migrate.
[13] In subsequent work together with Anke Becker and Benjamin Enke, they elicited risk attitudes, time preferences and different measures of prosociality among representative samples in 76 countries.
In neuroeconomics, together with Klaus Fliessbach, Christian E. Elger and Bernd Weber, they find that social comparison affects reward-related brain activity in the human ventral striatum.