As the German economy and the EU are emerging from the COVID-19 pandemic, the focus is shifting to questions of long-term transformation. How can we transform our economies while also limiting climate change and preparing for its impact?

The pandemic has accelerated digitalization of German firms and many have already invested to deal with climate change. At the same time, concerns about the risks represented by the transition to a net zero emission economy remain widespread. What is more, progress on digitalization and the energy transition has been far from uniform both within Germany and across the EU. What does it take to unlock confidence in the opportunities of transition on a broad basis? The context is challenging: supply chain disruptions and rising energy prices are a concern. However, not leveraging transition opportunities risks to negatively impact on sustainability, competitiveness and social cohesion.

The event will debate how Germany and Europe can accelerate the transformation to a smart and green economy successfully while mitigating transition risks. It will present findings from the new EIB Investment Report “Accelerating transformation” and the latest results from the EIB Investment Survey, a unique datasource providing insights on corporate investment activity for Germany and the EU, allowing understanding structural trends and challenges related to investment.

OLD DATE: 16.02

NEW DATE: unknown yet

About the content

Expectations about the future play a central role in any model of decision-making under uncertainty, and are of particular importance in macroeconomis, labor economics and political economy. This planned GC Masterclass has the goal to equip its participants with an overview of state-of-the-art methods to measure beliefs and expectations, design information interventions and design outcomes to minimize the relevance of anchoring and demand effects. A tentative curriculum could look as follows:

- Measuring Beliefs and Designing Information Provision Experiments
- Measuring Information Acquisition
- Subjective Beliefs in Political Economy
- Subjective Beliefs in Labour Economics
- Subjective Beliefs in Macroeconomics
- Measuring Mental Models of the Economy

About the instructor:

Christopher Roth, PhD, is Professor of Economics and Management at the University of Cologne and Member of the ECONtribute Cluster of Excellence: “Markets & Public Policy.” In addition, Christopher is affiliate of CESifo, briq and CEPR. His research fields are psychology and economics, political economy, and macro expectations. Christopher obtained his PhD in economics at the University of Oxford in 2018. In his young career, he published in journals such as American Economic Review, Review of Economics and Statistics and American Political Science Review. Moreover, his pipeline of research is filled with promising projects, all of which have the potential to be published in top outlets. In 2018, Christopher Roth and his co-author received the Reinhard-Selten-Award, which is a yearly award honoring the best young researchers from the German speaking region. It’s awarded by the “Verein für Socialpolitk”. Christopher and his co-authors shaped the literature on belief formation and information provision, which is reflected in their article “Designing Information Provision Experiments” (forthcoming in the Journal of Economic Literature). For additional information about Christopher, please visit his webpage: https://sites.google.com/site/chrisrotheconomics/home

The German Socio-Economic Panel Study is a representative panel study for the German population, collecting data on a broad variety of topics of everyday life, including general wellbeing, household composition, educational aspirations and educational status, income and occupational biographies, leisure time activities, housing, health, political orientation and more. With its long running panel structure, the breadth of topics and the representative nature of the data, the SOEP has become a central resources for quantitative research in the social sciences in Germany.

The 14th International German Socio-Economic Panel User Conference (SOEP2022) will be held in Berlin from June 30 to July 1, 2022 at DIW Berlin.

The conference provides researchers who use the SOEP (including the SOEP part of the Cross-National Equivalent File (CNEF) and LIS/LWS data) with the opportunity to present and discuss their work with their peers. Researchers of all disciplines (e.g., economics, demography, geography, political science, public health, psychology, and sociology) are invited to submit an abstract.