Institute News

The Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies hosted the second instalment of its Max Planck Summer School for Women in Political Economy from September 22 to 25 this year. The event was attended by twenty-seven female early-career researchers from Europe, North America, and Asia, who came together in Cologne to discuss current debates in the field and to establish professional networks. more

After fifteen years as a researcher at the MPIfG, Timur Ergen is taking over as director of the Institute Labour and Economy (iaw) at the University of Bremen. In addition to managing the institute, in his new role he will also teach economic sociology and political economy at the University of Bremen. more

Julian Jürgenmeyer, a postdoctoral researcher at the MPIfG between 2023 and 2025, is taking up a Harper-Schmidt Fellowship at the University of Chicago this fall. The four-year position as Collegiate Assistant Professor is one of the most coveted postdoctoral positions in the humanities in the US and combines research with teaching in this leading American university’s interdisciplinary undergraduate courses. more

The MPIfG's new Journalist in Residence between October and November 2025 is Jonas Seufert, a member of the investigative team at FragDenStaat. Prior to 2025 Seufert worked for ten years as a freelance reporter for DIE ZEIT, Süddeutsche Zeitung, ARD, ZDF, and CORRECTIV, among others. more

In mid-June of 2025, Zarah Westrich defended her dissertation “Work, Compare, Repeat: Social Comparisons as a Determinant of Working Hours in Germany” at the University of Duisburg-Essen. Her thesis analyzes the relationship between income inequality and working hours in Germany, focusing on the question of how income inequality influences time spent on paid employment and unpaid care work. 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

Düzgün Arslantaş more

Lucio Baccaro, Björn Bremer, Erik Neimanns more

40 Jahre MPIfG more

MPIfG at 40 more

MPIfG at 40 more

MPIfG at 40 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