ZEW Enters YES! School Competition 2020 with Seven Topics
Dates and News
Is working worth it for those relying on long-term unemployment benefits? How can we financially prepare for the future despite low interest rates? Can we reliably spot fake news as such? How can we make daycare allocations more efficient? What role does the labour market play in integrating refugees? Good answers to these questions simply aren’t had without input from the younger generation, which is exactly what the YES! – Young Economic Summit is for.
As part of the YES! – Young Economic Summit, high school students from all over Germany are tackling such topics. ZEW Mannheim will be supporting school teams from the South West region (Baden-Württemberg, Hesse, Rhineland-Palatinate and Saarland) in Germany’s largest school competition on economic issues in 2020. ZEW researchers are offering interested students seven topics to work with.
The competition starts with a kick-off at ZEW in February 2020, during which the students will have the opportunity to learn the basic principles of scientific research and familiarise themselves with their respective topics. Maintaining constant exchange with ZEW, the teams will then have four months to develop concrete solutions to these problems. The regional finals will take place on 1 July 2020 at ZEW, where the students can present their ideas. The students themselves will be picking out the two best teams to represent the South West in the national finals in Hamburg (autumn 2020), where they will be up against the other regional teams from across Germany.
ZEW accompanied the winning team from the Werner-Heisenberg-Gymnasium in Weinheim in 2019
ZEW will be taking part in the YES! competition for the fourth time now and is proud to have led one of their teams to victory every year since 2017. This year’s winning team, accompanied by Carina Fugger, from the ZEW Research Department “Environmental and Resource Economics, Environmental Management”, pulled through to the top with Greenpay, an incentive system that rewards environmentally conscious consumption. There’s lots of motivation to keep competing at the top for the fourth year in a row next year as well as continue housing the YES! Competition Cup at ZEW.
The seven YES! topics from ZEW for 2020 are
- Working While On Welfare: Is It Worth it? Florian Buhlmann
- Gründerzeit Now! From Innovative Start-Ups to Green Economy Johannes Bersch/Marius Berger
- Facts vs. Fake News – Why Digital Science Communication Is Becoming More Important Daniela Heimberger/Felix Kretz
- Efficiently Organising Daycare Allocations for Children Nicolas Fugger/Tobias Riehm
- My House, My Savings Account, My Retirement: Dealing with Low Interest Rates Karolin Kirschenmann/Jesper Riedler
- Public Institutions and Air-Travel – How Can the Coordination Problem Be Overcome? Vera Huwe/Theodoros Chatzivasileiadis
- Making It in the German Labour Market: Strengthening the Integration of Refugees Katrin Sommerfeld/Paul Berbée
About YES!
The YES! – Young Economic Summit falls under the patronage of the Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Energy. The YES! programme, a joint project by the ZBW – Leibniz Information Centre for Economics and the Joachim Herz Stiftung, is one of the biggest German school competitions aimed at getting young people to engage with global economic and social issues. Over the course of a six-month mentoring programme, student teams tackle pressing issues facing future generations. Researchers from various Leibniz institutions in Germany support the students by providing scientific expertise. By 2020, a total of 15 partner institutes will be participating. ZEW forms part of the South West region, in which the LOEWE Centre SAFE (“Sustainable Architecture for Finance in Europe”) and the Fraunhofer Institute for Industrial Engineering IAO are participating for the first time. By participating in YES!, students explore immediate political, social, economic and environmental challenges, giving them the opportunity to contribute their voices to current economic policy discourse.
