I am an Assistant Professor of Tax Law at Aalto University. In broad terms, my mission is to contribute to the improvement of the tax system. This means, on the one hand, that my team and I aim to ease the application of the law by contributing to the further development of legal doctrine. On the other hand, we are also focused on developing suggestions on whether and how tax rules should be changed. In this regard, we start from the legal system but aim to find non-legal arguments that could be used to advocate for certain changes, while keeping in mind the limitations set by the legal system itself. The end result is recommendations to political decision-makers. We frequently collaborate with researchers from other fields in this regard.
I am originally from Austria and studied at the Wirtschaftsuniversität Wien. I met my (now) Finnish wife while she was on exchange in Austria, which led me to move here and complete my PhD at Helsinki Law School. Although my mother tongue is German, I was eager to learn Finnish, and I seem to have managed well enough to teach in Finnish without receiving complaints from students. (I do not speak it perfectly, of course, but it does not appear to be necessary).