ZEW Visibly Contributes to VfS Annual Conference 2022 in Basel

ZEW Mannheim visibly contributed to the annual conference of the Verein für Socialpolitik (VfS) at the University of Basel, with a total of 12 presentations and its own information stand. From 11 to 14 September 2022, more than 800 researchers exchanged ideas on the core topic “Big Data in Economics” at the economic association’s international conference.

After the conference had to be held digitally for two years due to the pandemic, the VfS was now able to organise it in person again and put together a varied conference programme. In their presentations, ZEW researchers tackled a variety of topics ranging from the economic consequences of regional favouritism, the connection between a company’s level of digitalisation and short-time working during the pandemic, higher crime rates as a result of fine particle pollution, and the integration of migrants into the German labour market. In addition to the presentations, ZEW also hosted an information stand at the conference site, which offered VfS participants the opportunity to catch up on research, publications, events, and career possibilities at ZEW.

In 2022, the core conference was devoted to the topic of big data. For this year, the VfS was again able to win three high-profile researchers as keynote speakers: Raj Chetty from Harvard University, Raffaella Sadun from Harvard Business School and Michael Lechner from the University of St. Gallen, who has already held a ZEW Summer Course on causal machine learning in the past. In their presentations, the speakers shed light on various aspects of using big data in economics research.

Next year, the VfS Annual Conference will be held at the University of Regensburg from 24 to 27 September. The focus will be on “50 years of VfS. Growth and the sociale Frage”. The VfS currently has around 4,000 personal and corporate members, making it one of the largest economic associations in Europe.