Jeremiah Nollenberger Awarded Doctorate for Study on Stability of Coordinated Market Economies

September 2025 saw Jeremiah Nollenberger successfully defend his dissertation at the University of Duisburg-Essen. “Stabilizing the Coordinated Market Economy? Germany’s Government, Corporate, and Household Sectors in the Face of the Polycrisis” explores the mechanisms that stabilize the German economic model in times of crisis and whether these mechanisms function differently in different varieties of capitalism. Nollenberger analyzes three key sectors: In the corporate sector he shows that family firms offered much greater job security during the COVID-19 crisis than other companies, and did so by using more private financial instruments than their non-family-run counterparts. In the household sector he explores the effectiveness of one-off payments to households in stimulating consumption, a policy first adopted by the German government based on the Anglo-Saxon model during the pandemic. The surprising outcome of his analysis is that despite the traditionally high propensity to save in Germany, consumption topped 50 percent. His dissertation was supervised by Till van Treeck. Jeremiah Nollenberger was a doctoral researcher at the International Max Planck Research School on the Social and Political Constitution of the Economy (IMPRS-SPCE) between October 2021 and March 2025. From October to December of the same year he worked as an economist at the Momentum Institute, a progressive think tank in Vienna.