Institute News

MPIfG senior researcher Pálma Polyák is set to begin a Max Weber Fellowship at the Robert Schuman Centre of the European University Institute (EUI) in Florence in September 2025. The program is one of the most prestigious postdoctoral awards in the social sciences and humanities. more

In mid-February Marco Oberti successfully defended his doctoral dissertation at the University of Cologne. In “Forced Back into the Game but Unfit to Play: The Late Rebirth of European Industrial State Finance in the New Phase of Global Capitalism,” he investigates why industrial policy and state development finance have returned to the political agenda after a decades-long absence. more

On February 3 the ODEON cinema in Cologne hosted a screening of the documentary BLAME and a talk between its director, Christian Frei, and the MPIfG’s Leon Wansleben on the role of science in times of crisis. Frei’s film follows the scapegoating of three scientists during the COVID-19 pandemic: Having warned years earlier of a pandemic, they found themselves at the center of disinformation and political finger-pointing after its outbreak. more

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. more

Clara Baumann is taking up a postdoctoral position at the University of Münster in March of this year. Joining the economic geography and globalization research group of Prof. Sarah Sippel, she will both pursue her own habilitation project and teach. more

Daria Tisch more

The MPIfG hosted the second Max Planck Summer School for Women in Political Economy in September 2025. First launched two years earlier in response to the problem of women’s underrepresentation at all levels of the discipline, the initiative aims to establish a network of women researchers in political economy and reduce existing gendered inequalities. Leonie Fernholz, a doctoral researcher at the MPIfG, shares her personal impressions and insights from a week of workshops, skills sessions, and roundtables. more

For long-term stability, Germany should not only focus on exports, but also strengthen its own domestic market. more

Jens Beckert more

Arianna Tassinari more

MPIfG Lecture more

MPIfG Lecture more

MPIfG Lecture more

40 Jahre MPIfG more

MPIfG at 40 more

The European constitutional navigation of the noughties succeeded in stipulating that European integration had ushered in European society (Article 2 TEU). This choice remains underexplored. In light of current European uncertainty, the lecture explores the meaning and promise of European society. more

In her lecture, Valeria Pulignano introduces a theory of the politics of unpaid labor, advancing our understanding of inequality within the context of precarious work. She establishes a crucial link between unpaid labor’s political dimensions and its role in fueling emerging forms of precarious work that are characterized by persistent inequalities in a context of labor market reforms, societal shifts, and technological changes. She shows how these seemingly disparate elements intertwine, connecting the intricate dynamics of the social system's micro-level components to larger macro-level structural patterns. Advancing the current discussion on how unpaid labor contributes to inequality in precarious work, she will establish the characteristics differentiating employment from self-employment, and how these lead to a revised definition of unpaid labor. She further illustrates that unpaid labor is both shaped by class and serves to reproduce class interests, revealing ongoing changes in welfare, employment, and state institutional policies. Finally, she considers the necessity to establish conditions within the labor market that are conducive to genuinely cultivating and honoring the diversity of human capabilities and actions within labor structures and promoting their manifestation. more

Beliefs about the future shape attitudes, experiences, and priorities in the present. This lecture explores the relationship between democracy and the expected world to come. As it argues, visions of the future are an important resource for democratic politics, as a way to put the present in critical perspective, to aid in the formation of a collective agent, and to consolidate commitment in adversity. Indirectly, they contribute also to the legitimacy of democratic institutions, shaping the exercise of citizenship and the capacity to contend with the flaws of representation. The democratic significance of the imagined future becomes all the more visible in today’s age of skepticism towards future-regarding politics, where speculative modes of thinking run up against the desire for certainty and precision. more

This introductory lecture lays out the main object of study of the lecture series, the shadow banking system, its wider importance for the understanding of the contemporary political economy, and the dominant explanations for its rise as well as its positive and detrimental effects. The shadow banking system – the generation and trading of credit outside of the banking system, financed with short-term deposits – and its rise after WWII, is identified in the contemporary literature as a major factor in the process of financialization that unfolded from the 1970s and in the diffusion and impact of the Transatlantic Financial Crisis as it unfolded from 2007. As such, it is closely linked to the central banks’ rise to the heights of macroeconomic policy and the credit-based growth model more

The second lecture pursues the theme of agency of state actors in an attempt to explain the rise of the shadow banking system in the US by focusing on the establishment of the core market for liquidity provision to the shadow banking system, namely the repo-market in the US after WWII. It introduces the crucial concept of the liquidity triangle between the fiscal agent, the central bank, and private market-makers in order to develop the reasons that drove state actors to lay the foundations for the expansion of the shadow banking system. It documents how the Federal Reserve consciously and against prevalent legal interpretations started to enter into the provision of liquidity to broker dealers via the repo-market. more