Institute News

Max Willems successfully defended his dissertation, “Pricing Power: The Political Economy of Renewable Energy Transitions in Europe,” at the University of Duisburg-Essen on October 2, 2026. In his study, he asks who wins and who loses from decarbonization, and why. more

On September 29, Pauline Kohlhase successfully defended her dissertation in political science at the University of Cologne’s Faculty of Management, Economics and Social Sciences. In “Gendering Growth Models: Care Formalization, Female Employment and Demand Formation,” she examines how the decline of the male breadwinner model, rising female employment, and the increasing formalization of care work since the 1990s have changed national growth models in advanced capitalist economies. more

In July of this year, Pálma Polyák and Erik Neimanns, both senior researchers in the Political Economy Research Area at the MPIfG, had their employment contracts extended indefinitely. The permanent positions offer the two researchers a long-term employment perspective and the opportunity to pursue a habilitation. more

On September 1, Camilla Locatelli left the MPIfG to take up a postdoc position at the University of Heidelberg’s Max Weber Institute of Sociology, where she is part of the ERC SOCDEBT project led by Nora Waitkus, Professor of Social Structure Analysis. In joining the project, Locatelli is expanding her research interests, which have focused to date on state fiscal policy and fiscal surveillance.  more

Erik Neimanns recently gave a talk at Cologne’s City Hall as part of “Science in City Hall” series organized by the Cologne Science Forum. In his talk, Neimanns presented a study coauthored with Antonella Faggin and funded by the German Institute for Interdisciplinary Social Policy Research (DIFIS) on the difficulties of accessing nursery and after-school childcare in Germany.  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

SiR Lecture Series 2026 - 3 more

SiR Lecture Series 2026 - 2 more

SiR Lecture Series 2026 - 1 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