News

On February 28, 2024, the Commission of Experts for Research and Innovation (Expertenkommission Forschung und Innovation - EFI) handed over its 2025 report to Chancellor Olaf Scholz and Federal Minister Bettina Stark-Watzinger.

On December 08, 2023, Francisco Flores Taipe successfully defended his doctoral dissertation "Testing the Impact of Large-scale Digital Support on Students' Paths Toward College Education". Thesis and defense were graded with the top grade "summa cum laude". Francisco's dissertation research was part of the Showing Life Opportunities project that we conducted together with a great team of collaborators. Congratulations, Dr. Flores!

How to organize education online when students cannot go to school? To help answer this question, EPIE researchers Igor Asanov, Anastasiya-Mariya Asanov, Francisco Flores and Guido Buenstorf, joint with our colleagues Tom Åstebro and Mathis Schulte (HEC Paris), Bruno Crépon (ENSAE), David McKenzie (World Bank) and Mona Mensmann (University of Cologne), tested various light-touch interventions to improve students' educational process and knowledge outcomes. Results of this study, which was part of the INCHER project Showing Life Opportunities, have now been published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).

Asanov, I., Asanov, A.-M., Åstebro, T., Buenstorf, G., Crépon, B., McKenzie, D., Flores, F. P., Mensmann, M., Schulte, M. (2023). System-, teacher-, and student-level interventions for improving participation in online learning at scale in high schools. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 120(30): e2216686120.

Key findings of the study are summarized in an Innovation Growth Lab blog post.

On July 06-08, 2023, the EPIE group hosts the annual conference of the Evolutionary Economics Committee in Verein für Socialpolitik (Economic Association of the German-speaking countries). Ongoing societal and economic transitions - in particular, decarbonization and digitization - and their economic and societal implications are in the focus of the debate. Evolutionary economics is an approach to economics that highlights dynamic processes of innovative change in the economy.

On May 12, 2023, EPIE team member Burcu Ozgun successfully defended her doctoral dissertation Geography of News - Empirical Studies of German News Mediaat Utrecht University. Her advisors were Ron Boschma (Utrecht University) and Tom Broekel (Stavanger University). Congratulations, Dr. Ozgun!

After the invasion of Ukraine on 24 February 2022, more than 14 million Ukrainians had to flee their country, or were internally displaced, giving rise to the largest human displacement crisis in the world today. Our early onlineassessment of the mental health of 1165 Ukrainian help-seekers across the European Union and Ukraine show that Ukrainian refugees, internally displaced are at exceptionallyhigh risk of depression and have high stress level. To help learning how to overcome high levels of stress, EPIE team members Anastasiya-Mariya Asanov Noha, Igor Asanov and Guido Buenstorf developed an online stress management course (Self-Help Online) . It uses effective offline materials developed by the WHO to help refugees and was tested by our team for the online learning format. The online course on stress management is designed for Ukrainian refugees and temporarily displaced persons who are under severe stress. It is provided free of charge thanks to the financial support of INCHER.

Access to the course: https://www.sho4ukraine.com/

Related publication:

Asanov Noha, A.M., Asanov, I. and Buenstorf, G., 2022. Mental health and stress level of Ukrainians seeking psychological help online.medRxiv, pp.2022-08.

On February 15, 2023, the German Expert Commission for Research and Innovation (EFI) handed over its 2023 report to Chancellor Olaf Scholz and Minister Bettina Stark-Watzinger.

Dr. Katarina Zigova, EPIE researcher and associated member of INCHER, was appointed to an assistant professorship at the University of Zurich. Congratulations, Katarina!

How important are entrepreneurship and management practices in economic development? What measures are effective to support economic development in the global south? Questions like these are in the research focus of David McKenzie, our speaker in the IVWL Research Seminar Economic Behavior and Governance on June 23, 2021. The talk will present findings of a randomized experiment that compares effects of training and consulting for small enterprises to those of supporting these firms in the outsourcing of tasks and the insourcing of competences. The experiment shows the relevance of overcoming the "boundary of the entrepreneur" for firm performance.

Twofold recognition for researchers of the Economic Policy, Innovation and Entrepreneurship Group: Johannes König’s doctoral dissertation “Growth and development in the German university system. Five empirical studies about expansion and qualitative change” won the 2020 Research Award of the Faculty of Economics and Management at the University of Kassel. Andreas Rehs received the Junior Researcher Award 2020 of the Graduate School in Economic Behavior and Governance. The award was given to his article "A structural topic model approach to scientific reorientation of economics and chemistry after German reunification” published in Scientometrics in 2020.

EPIE group members Igor Asanov and Francisco Flores co-authored a new World Bank Policy Research Paper, in which they report findings on remote learning, student time use and mental health during the COVID-19 quarantine in Ecuador. Hard hit by the COVID-19 pandemic, Ecuador closed down all schools in March 2020, which forced students to turn to remote learning. A survey of over 1,500 high school students aged 14 to 18 was conducted as part of an ongoing joint project by INCHER-Kassel, HEC and ENSAE Paris, Warwick Business School, the World Bank’s research department and the government of Ecuador. The survey finds that 59 percent of the students have internet access at home and 74 percent engage in some remote learning. Most students have developed daily routines around education, but time use for working and household tasks differs by gender and wealth. Mental health scores indicate depression for 16 percent of the surveyed students.  

Our Showing Life Opportunities (SLO) project has won the prestigious Path to Scale Award granted by Innovations for Poverty Action, a US-based non-profit that sponsors experimental work in development economics. The award recognizes SLO’s achievements in scaling up interventions from specific experimental settings to large-scale applications. It was handed out to EPIE members Dr. Igor Asanov and Francisco Flores during a ceremony at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).

SLO studies the effectiveness of psychology-based trainings provided through online courses in fostering innovative entrepreneurship. This a currently tested in a large-scale randomized control trial including about 20,000 high school students in Ecuador.

SLO is a joint project by INCHER-Kassel, HEC and ENSAE Paris, Warwick Business School, the World Bank’s research department and the government of Ecuador. It is funded by Innovation Growth Lab, the World Bank Strategic Impact Evaluation Fund, Innovations for Poverty Action, funds from the French excellence initiative as well as INCHER-Kassel.

In 2016, the University of Gothenburg (Sweden) appointed Guido Buenstorf as a Visiting Professor, initially for a three-year period. This appointment has now been extended for two more years. Buenstorf will remain affiliated with the Institute of Innovation and Entrepreneurship.  

Johannes König, research fellow at the Economic Policy, Innovation and Entrepreneurship Group was awarded the Junior Researcher Award 2018 by the University of Kassel's Graduate School in Economic Behavior and Governance. The award was given to the article "Replication and robustness analysis of ‘energy and economic growth in the USA: A multivariate approach’" published in Energy Economics.

Guido Buenstorf is the local organizer of the 2018 Annual Meeting of the Regional Economics Committee (Ausschuss für Regionaltheorie und -politik) in the Verein fuer Socialpolitik, the largest association of economists in the German-speaking world. For three days, committee members discuss their current research. The policy perspective is represented by Staatssekretär Dr. Markus Kerber (Federal Ministry of the Interior, Building and Community).

Supporting economic development through raising awareness for opportunity-based entrepreneurship and careers in science and technology - that is the objective of Showing Life Opportunities, a new project the EPIE group has embarked on. Joint with partners from France, the U.S. and the U.K. we will provide online training courses to about 20,000 high school students in Ecuador. The project was publicly announced in June 2018 and received coverage by the major Ecuadorian media outlets. Courses are scheduled to begin in March 2019.

On May 30, 2018, Dominik Heinisch successfully defended his doctoral dissertation "The Inheritance of Knowledge: Empirical Perspectives on the Economics of Knowledge Creation and Dissemination", which received the top grade "summa cum laude". Dominik Heinisch has been with the Economic Policy, Innovation and Entrepreneurship Group since 2013. He coordinates the WISKIDZ project on academic careers in Germany. 

Andreas Rehs, research fellow at the Economic Policy, Innovation and Entrepreneurship Group was awarded the Chair in Management of Creativity Prize at the 10th European Meeting on Applied Evolutionary Economics in Strasbourg (May 31 - June 3 2017) for the most creative paper presented at the meeting. The award was given to the paper "Husband and wife thrive? Performance of German doctoral couples in natural sciences", which is based on his Master thesis. Andreas investigated, whether married scientists outperform scientists who are married to a partner from another occupation.

Guido Buenstorf, head of the Economic Policy, Innovation and Entrepreneurship (EPIE) Group, spends the spring term at Stanford University. He is a visiting scholar at the SCANCOR Center and works on projects related to organizations, individual careers and industry evolution. Dominik Heinisch, research associate at the EPIE Group, is currently visiting Boston University. His work focuses on scientists’ careers inside and outside the academic sector.

Dominik Heinisch, research fellow at the Economic Policy, Innovation and Entrepreneurship Group was awarded the Junior Researcher Award 2016 by the University of Kassel's Graduate School in Economic Behavior and Governance. The award was given to the article "Same place, same knowledge – same people? The geography of non-patent citations in Dutch polymer patents” published in Economics of Innovation and New Technology in 2016. It was shared by Elina Khachatryan from the Environmental and Behavioral Economics Group.

The Economic Policy, Innovation and Entrepreneurship Group will be represented at the Futurale Film Festival in Kassel. On Tuesday, September 27, Guido Buenstorf will host a post-screening expert talk on "Silicon Wadi", a documentary about entrepreneurship in Israel. The Tel Aviv region of Israel is known as one of the world's leading entrepreneurship hubs. But as is shown in "Silicon Wadi", that does not mean that starting a new firm is easy, or that success would be guaranteed. The workshop program can be found here.

Why are some regions prosperous while others perish? Which role do variable actors, regional structures, and transfer processes between institutions play in the course of this? What can politics contribute to a successful regional development?

These questions were discussed by the students of Economics from the University of Kassel this semester in the course „Perspektiven der Regionalentwicklung“ which is held in cooperation with the TU Dresden. Firstly, the participants made themselves familiar with selected theories of Regional Economics. To examine their relevance in the field, an excursion to Dresden took place on the 26^th of May. Together with the students from Dresden, the group visited the Helmholtz-Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf and Globalfoundries. On the 23^rd of June, the students from Dresden came to see Kassel, where the whole group visited the SMA Solar Technology AG and the Volkswagen AG - Original Teile Center in Baunatal. The gathered impressions were reviewed in a creative atmosphere in the Idea Lab of the Science Park Kassel on the 24^th of June, after a presentation about Clustermanagement in North Hesse which was held by Astrid Szogs from the regional management of North Hesse.

New name, same agenda - as of July 2016, the new name of our group better reflects our research focus on the governance of economic change.

Also new: Guido Buenstorf, head of the EPIE Group, has been appointed Executive Vice Director of INCHER-Kassel. He will moreover be a Visiting Professor at the Institute of Innovation and Entrepreneurship, University of Göteborg (Sweden), from 2016 to 2019.

This international workshop (June 27-28, 2016, at Science Park Kassel) brings together scholars from economics, management and sociology to discuss findings on the careers of scientists. In addition to patterns and determinants of academic career trajectories, it will also explore career outcomes of individuals who left public research to find employment in the private sector. The workshop is jointly organized by the Economic Policy Research Group and INCHER-Kassel as part of the BMBF project WISKIDZ. Confirmed speakers include Jeff Furman (Boston University), Hanna Hottenrott (TUM), Monika Jungbauer-Gans (DZHW) and Henry Sauermann (Georgia Tech). Additional participants are welcome. The workshop program can be found here.

The Economic Policy Research Group has moved to new rooms in Mönchebergstrasse 17. We are now sharing space with our collaboration partners of INCHER-Kassel. The Meta-Research in Economics Group is still located in our old quarters in the Wiso B building. Student consultations will also remain to take place there.

Guido Buenstorf co-organizes an INCHER-Kassel workshop on Academic Entrepreneurship and University Technology Transfer (April 11-12, 2016). The workshop will focus on how transfer activities relate to universities' traditional missions of research and teaching, and how they affect the university as an organization. Keynotes will be given by Aldo Geuna (University of Turin) and Walter W. Powell (Stanford University). The program can be found here. 

BibSonomy Genealogie creates a user-generated genealogy of research at German universities. It is based on the dissertation catalog of the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek (DNB). Users enter linkages between existing dissertations (advisor information etc.) and provide information about missing dissertations.

BibSonomy Genealogie is part of the WISKIDZ project and has been developed in cooperation with the Knowledge and Data Engineering team of Professor Stumme. The first beta version is now online: BibSonomy Genealogie. 

Together with Rajshree Agarwal (Maryland), Wesley Cohen (Duke) and Franco Malerba (Bocconi), Guido Buenstorf has co-edited a special issue of Industrial and Corporate Change honoring the late Steven Klepper. The special issue brings together a set of articles discussing and extending Klepper's pioneering work on industry evolution, entrepreneurship and economic geography. Contributors include Ashish Arora, Ron Boschma, Serguey Braguinsky, Cristobal Cheyre, Wesley Cohen, Constance Helfat, Jon Kowalski, David Mowery, and Francisco Veloso. A hitherto unpublished paper by Michael Dahl and Steven Klepper is also included. The editors' intoductory essay can be found here.

(http://icc.oxfordjournals.org/content/24/4/739.full.pdf+html) 

After 3:45:59 h, the Economic Policy Research Group's relay running team "In the Long Run We Are All Dead" (Guido Buenstorf, Dominik Heinisch, Johannes Koenig and Andreas Rehs) crossed the finish line of the 2015 Kassel Marathon. 

This means we were about nine minutes faster than in 2014. Extrapolating this trend, we should be competitive by about 2025... 

On April 20, 2015, Ann-Kathrin Blankenberg successfully defended her doctoral dissertation. Focusing on the German solar cell and laser industries, the dissertation studied the roles of innovation, public policy and university research in industry evolution. Ann-Kathrin Blankenberg graduated from the University of Kassel and has been a member of the Economic Policy Group since May 2011.

Research and teaching are the traditional tasks of universities. At their interface lies the education of junior researchers. During their doctoral and post-doctoral studies, junior researchers acquire the knowledge and the competences required to engage in independent research and teaching activities. At the same time, the academic system reproduces itself by recruiting freshly minted junior researchers.

How has this process of academic reproduction changed over time? Empirical answers to this question are the objective of our project WISKIDZ (German title: „Wissenschaftliche Karrieredynamiken in Deutschland im Zeitablauf:  Disziplinäre Muster und Effekte der Arbeitsmarktsituation bei der Rekrutierung des akademischen Nachwuchses“) which is funded by the German Federal Ministry for Education and Research (BMBF) for a three-year period.

In this project, career trajectories and recruitment patterns of junior researchers in selected fields of science, engineering, social science and the humanities will be reconstructed for the period from 1945 to the present. Various types of information will be aggregated at the individual level. Based on this long-term approach, we can, e.g., investigate how the career relevance of the Habilitation, being educated at high-reputation universities or being part of prominent “schools” has developed over time. The investigation is conducted for Germany.

Given that many junior researchers end up pursuing careers outside academe, WISKIDZ will also study how differences between conditions in academic and non-academic labor markets affect individual career choices. To what extent do subsequent career choices reflect early self-selection into different environments, e.g., more or less research-oriented schools and departments? To what extent are they shaped by learning and socialization in the chosen environment (e.g., based on advisor and peer group effects)? And how important are, in the final analysis, objective labor market conditions for future career outcomes?

Beginning this fall, Dr. Stephan Bruns will head an independent junior research group on evidence-based economics associated with the Economic Policy Research Group. Bruns joined our group as a post-doctoral researcher in May 2014. In the new group, he will expand his current research on research synthesis in economics. The group focuses on the development of meta-regression models for the synthesis of observational studies. These methods will be also applied to issues in energy economics and innovation studies contributing to a reliable foundation for evidence-based economic policy.

How do retractions affect fields of research and the careers of the involved individuals? Empirical findings on this issue are presented by Jeff Furman in his brown bag seminar at INCHER-Kassel (Thursday, July 3, 2-4 pm at the INCHER seminar room, Mönchebergstrasse 17). Jeff Furman is Associate Professor of Strategy & Innovation at Boston University and a Faculty Research Fellow at the NBER. His research has been published, among others, in the American Economic Review, Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization, Research Policy, Industrial & Corporate Change, as well as Nature (Photo credits: ZEW).

Despite a growing body of scholarly work, many aspects of knowledge transfer from universities to the private sector are only imperfectly understood. What relationships exist between individual transfer channels such as publications, academic entrepreneurship, R&D collaboration, or graduate and researcher mobility? Under which conditions and to what extent is knowledge transfer geographically bounded, and how broad is its geographic reach? When does knowledge transfer result in knowledge spillovers (i.e., externalities)? And finally, what can and should public policy do to ensure that society can benefit from the new knowledge created at universities as best possible? These questions were in the focus of the workshop “Beyond Spillovers? Channels and Effects of Knowledge Transfer from Universities” that the Economic Policy Research Group (EPRG) and the INCHER-Kassel organized on March 6 and 7, 2014. The workshop was part of our RE-BILD project on regional effects of higher education sponsored by the German Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF).

In the two-day workshop, leading scholars from Europe and the U.S. engaged in intensive discussions about a range of topics including, for example, effects of licensing on the diffusion of knowledge (Arvids Ziedonis, Stanford University; photo), geographic effects of large-scale research facilities (Christian Helmers, Santa Clara University) and international differences in the returns to academic entrepreneurship (Thomas Astebro, HEC Paris). Individual mobility as a conduit of knowledge transfer was the subject of several talks. Dietmar Harhoff (Max Planck Institute Munich) focused on inventor mobility, and Cornelia Lawson (Universities of Nottingham and Torino) presented results on researcher mobility. Patterns and determinants of the mobility of graduates in the Netherlands and in Denmark were discussed by Sjerdjan Koster (University of Groningen) and by Ina Drejer, Jacob Holm and Kristian Nielsen (Aalborg University). For the German context, Matthias Geissler and Nicolas Winterhager (University of Kassel) presented findings on graduate mobility from the EPRG’s own RE-BILD project.

How do scientists from different disciplines perceive and react to an increasing pressure to compete for third-party funding? This question was in the focus of Nico Winterhager’s dissertation project, which was successfully defended on February 6, 2014. In his dissertation, Nicolas reports findings from an extensive set of interviews with researchers from biotechnology and medieval historiography, as well as members of the departmental and university leadership. He shows that competing for third-party funding needs not be motivated by financial needs, but may also be used to signal competitiveness and societal relevance within the university. Scientists from the two studied disciplines substantially differed in their conception of the competitive process. Nicolas has been a member of INCHER-Kassel since November 2009. In 2011, he joined the team of RE-BILD, a joint project by the Economic Policy Research Group and INCHER-Kassel.

On the 27^th of November, Matthias Geissler, research associate at the Economic Policy Research Group, successfully defended his dissertation project (“Firm Dynamics and Organizational Capabilities in the Evolution of the German Laser Industry”) at the Friedrich Schiller University Jena. In his work Matthias draws on the concept of organizational capabilities to explain changes in the activities of firms within an industry, between different stages of the value chain, among industries and across regional boundaries. Moreover, the dissertation project touched the Economics of Science by exploring capability transfer through face-to-face learning among different generations of laser scientists. Matthias was a member of the DFG Research Training Group 1411 "The Economics of Innovative Change" at the University of Jena and the IIDEOS PhD program (“Innovation, Industrial Dynamics, Entrepreneurship, Organisation and Space”) hosted jointly by the Philipps-University Marburg and the University of Kassel. He is looking forward to deepen his understanding of the Economics of Science through the recently started WISKIDZ (“Wissenschaftliche Karrieredynamiken in Deutschland im Zeitablauf”) project at the Economic Policy Research Group.

Jointly with the Halle Institute of Economic Research (IWH) and the Chair of Innovation Economics at the University of Hohenheim, the Economic Policy Research Group co-organized a workshop on "The Evolution of Networks, Industries and Clusters (ENIC)". The workshop provided an opportunity for senior and junior researchers to discuss recent developments, ideas, frameworks and theories, and takes place in Halle on July 18 and 19. Keynote lectures were given by Stefano Breschi (Università Bocconi, Milano), Paolo Saviotti (Université Pierre Mendès-France, Grenoble) and Bart Verspagen (UNU-MERIT, Maastricht).

We have received the sad news that Steven Klepper, Arthur A. Hamerschlag Professor of Economics and Social Science at Carnegie Mellon University, passed away on May 27, 2013. Steven Klepper pioneered the research on industry evolution and made path-breaking contributions to the understanding of employee entrepreneurship and the regional concentration of industries. The conceptual foundations, theoretical models and empirical tools developed by him guide much of the research of our group. His advice was crucial in shaping our projects, agenda and outlook. Over the past ten years, Steven Klepper and Guido Buenstorf intensely collaborated in an empirical research project studying the evolution of the U.S. tire industry. With Steve, the Economic Policy Research Group has lost an eminent teacher and role model, a wonderful person, and a good friend.

Steven Klepper’s outstanding contributions were celebrated by the Consortium for Competitiveness and Collaboration on March 22, 2013.

Two articles on technology transfer co-authored by members of the Economic Policy Research Group have been published in the March 2013 issue of Research Policy. Stefan Krabel is part of a group of leading European scholars discussing prior findings on processes and outcomes of academic engagement with private-sector partners in a survey article. (Perkman, M. et al.: “Academic engagement and commercialisation: A review of the literature on university–industry relations”, Research Policy, 42 (2013): 423– 442).

Together with Alexander Schacht (FSU Jena), Guido Buenstorf has explored the effects of geographic distance on commercialization outcomes in technology transfer from public research (Buenstorf, G. and A. Schacht: “We need to talk - or do we? Geographic distance and the commercialization of technologies from public research”, Research Policy, 42 (2013): 465– 480.)

Michael S. Dahl, Professor of Entrepreneurship and Organizations at Aalborg University (Denmark), was the guest speaker of the Economics Research Seminar on February 13, 2013. He presented new findings on how HRM measures moderate the effects of organizational change on employee stress. Professor Dahl's research is located at the boundaries of economics and management. It uses unique empirical strategies to match linked employer-employee datasets with detailed individual-level information. His work has been published, among others, in Administrative Science Quarterly, Management Science, Research Policy and the Journal of Urban Economics. Michael Dahl's research in the media (in German)

Detroit, once the birthplace of the industrial middle class, is now a symbol of de-industrialization, population loss and catastrophic urban blight. But as it is shown by the award-winning documentary DETROPIA, present-day Detroit is also a place of new visions and - literally - creative destruction.

The movie demonstrates how new life emerges from the ruins of mass production, how opportunities and possibly the seeds of urban renewal are created from urban decline.

DETROPIA has won critical praise and several awards at U.S. film festivals. It had its first German screening during the DokFest Kassel on Thursday, November 15, 2012.

The Economic Policy Research Group is proud to have helped bring this important movie to Kassel. More information about DETROPIA is available here (in German)

A new book edited by Guido Buenstorf has been published by Edward Elgar. Evolution, Organization and Economic Behavior brings together ten papers exploring the interfaces between Evolutionary Economics, Behavioral Economics and Management.

Chapter authors include Zakaria Babutsidze, Markus Becker, Ron Boschma, Thierry Burger-Helmchen, Uwe Cantner, Christian Cordes, Michael Dahl, Herbert Dawid, Koen Frenken, Pernille Gjerlov-Juel, Werner Güth, Philipp Harting, Hartmut Kliemt, Stefan Krabel and Patrick Llerena.