Events
Die jährliche Forschungskonferenz des Zentrums für fortgeschrittene Studien „Finanzen und Ungleichheit“ (CASFI) freut sich, ihre jährliche Forschungskonferenz anzukündigen, die am 28. und 29. August 2025 stattfinden wird. Diese zweitägige Veranstaltung bringt führende Wissenschaftler zusammen, um die neuesten Fortschritte auf diesem Gebiet zu diskutieren. Ziel des Zentrums ist es, den Austausch zwischen Wissenschaftlern der Wirtschafts- und Finanzgeschichte sowie der Makroökonomie, die sich mit dem Zusammenhang zwischen Finanzen und Ungleichheit befassen, fruchtbar zu fördern. Wir freuen uns besonders, dass drei CASFI-Fellows die Rolle des Sitzungsvorsitzenden übernehmen werden: Sergio de Ferra wird am Freitagvormittag die Sitzung 3 leiten, Federica Romei wird am späten Vormittag den Vorsitz der Sitzung 4 übernehmen und John D. Turner wird am Nachmittag die Sitzung 5 leiten.
The 4th CASFI workshop will take place in October 27-28, 2025. It brings together fellows and invited speakers to present and discuss current research in the field of finance and inequality. The program combines keynote lectures with presentations by four CASFI fellows, who will introduce their projects and preliminary findings. Each session follows a 30-minute presentation and a 15-minute discussion format, ensuring space for scholarly exchange and feedback.
Since the invasion of Ukraine in 2022, several governments have regulated electricity and gas prices to shield households from sharp increases in inflation. We analyse the welfare effects of such policies, considering not only their direct impacts on consumption and distributional outcomes but also their macroeconomic implications and interactions with monetary policy. We derive a welfare formula within a multi-sector New Keynesian framework featuring heterogeneity in income, wealth, and consumption baskets. Our results show that energy price controls can enhance social welfare by alleviating the central bank’s trade-off between the output gap and inflation, which may outweigh the adverse welfare effects of distorted consumption baskets. Stabilizing the aggregate demand effects of such price controls may require large interest rate adjustments, generating adverse redistributive consequences. We apply our framework quantitatively to the energy price cap implemented by the UK government.
Using an administrative data set from Germany we estimate a functional VAR to measure the response of the earnings distribution to a productivity shock. We then replace the functional part of the VAR by cross-sectional-unit-level income dynamics equations (csuVAR), discuss model properties and estimation. In the empirical application we compare the csuVAR responses to the fVAR results and discuss the pros and cons of the respective modeling approaches.
By diverting and distorting bilateral trade flows, trade wars shift export patterns and market concentration around the globe. In this paper, we estimate parameters in n-country general equilibrium trade model featuring oligopolistic competition with data from a rich panel of firm-level exports from 11 low and middle-income countries to 165 destinations that report bilateral and multilateral tariffs to the World Trade Organization. We show that, by affecting entry/exit decisions of large firms active in export markets, a tariff war between two countries results in a significant rise in market concentration and market power globally, driving down welfare.
The ascent of AI has both been fuelled by and produced a steady proliferation of images, which disturb not only through their sheer number, but due to their very nature. On the one hand, the images unsettle through their undeniable verisimilitude, sparking concerns about deep fakes, forgery, trust etc. in both political and personal domains. On the other hand, AI images disrupt through their uncanny quality, their mixture of hyper-realism and crude inaccuracy, which seems to manifest an intelligence parasitic upon and yet very much not our own. The increasing omnipresence of such images suggests that we think of AI image-cultures themselves as iconoclastic phenomena, but one occurring within the realm of image-production itself: a set of fundamental challenges to our understanding of the politics and ontology of images and associated preconceptions about originality, creativity, accuracy and representation.
Whilst typical AI user interfaces are designed to facilitate the illusion of a person-to-person interaction, the user is, of course, engaging with a vast ‘social’ network distributed across human, non-biological and digital nodes, enabled by an infrastructure comprising human intellectual labour, data centres, energy resources etc. How should this sociality be modelled? What is its ontological status? The participation in social networks that enables human intelligence is reflected in the very nature of that intelligence – but does this, as is often claimed, provide a model for understanding the relation between AI and its (very different) enabling conditions? The Kyoto workshop will be devoted to addressing these and related questions.
You are cordially invited to the last digital lecture evening of this semester on January 13 (6:15 p.m.). Join Prof. Dr. Jörg Frey @trf_uzh and Dr. Jasmine Suhner @theologieluzern for their lecture and participate in the discussion.
You are cordially invited to the second digital lecture evening of this semester on December 16 (6:15 p.m.).
You are cordially invited to the first digital lecture evening of this semester on November 4 (6:15 p.m.).
Together with recognized experts from science and society, we go on a weekly ThinkJourney to explore desirable futures in different areas of life, spanning the semester. Our guests present their research and discuss with students, young researchers and interested members of the public. At the end of the semester, the journeys of thought are followed by a joint journey in real life to a thematically relevant place or institution: This summer semester we will travel to the Futurium in Berlin.
Together with recognized experts from science and society, we go on a weekly ThinkJourney to explore desirable futures in different areas of life, spanning the semester. Our guests present their research and discuss with students, young researchers and interested members of the public. At the end of the semester, the journeys of thought are followed by a joint journey in real life to a thematically relevant place or institution.
Together with recognized experts from science and society, we go on a weekly ThinkJourney to explore desirable futures in different areas of life, spanning the semester. Our guests present their research and discuss with students, young researchers and interested members of the public. At the end of the semester, the journeys of thought are followed by a joint journey in real life to a thematically relevant place or institution.
Together with recognized experts from science and society, we go on a weekly ThinkJourney to explore desirable futures in different areas of life, spanning the semester. Our guests present their research and discuss with students, young researchers and interested members of the public. At the end of the semester, the journeys of thought are followed by a joint journey in real life to a thematically relevant place or institution.
Together with recognized experts from science and society, we go on a weekly ThinkJourney to explore desirable futures in different areas of life, spanning the semester. Our guests present their research and discuss with students, young researchers and interested members of the public. At the end of the semester, the journeys of thought are followed by a joint journey in real life to a thematically relevant place or institution.
International Conference and Annual Workshop (June 22-23, 2023): ‘AI Human, Values and Meaningful Human Control’ For the conference program please see the links and information provided below.
With the EU AI Act entering into force under the New Legislative Framework, the standardization of AI technologies transitions from a conceptual goal to a legal mandate. In recent years, efforts have been made to evaluate the societal impacts of AI technologies beyond mere legal safeguards, aiming to “operationalize,” “standardize,” and even “certify” ethics. At the same time, actual ethical concerns regarding the operationalization of ethics have grown. In the forthcoming conference, our main questions focus on hidden stakeholders, values, and how profit-making might interfere with certifying and standardizing AI technologies. The conference will revolve around two main topics: 1. The certification of ethics. 2. Driving forces and power imbalances in the current AI ecosystem (especially regarding its governance and certification). This conference is the final event of the philosophical sub-project of the KI.NRW-Flagship project “Zertifizierte KI”.
We will talk about this with Tim Achtermeyer, the NRW state chairman of Bündnis 90/ Die Grünen and André Christ, Co-Founder & General Manager of SAP LeanIX. The discussion will be scientifically accompanied by Dr. Florian Mai, computer scientist and junior research group leader at the Conversational AI and Social Analytics (CAISA) Lab at the University of Bonn and Dr. Julia Maria Mönig, philosopher and ethicist and project manager of the philosophy sub-project in the KI.NRW flagship project “Certified AI”.
"Coming to terms with technology: thinking with / in / through Hannah Arendt", Vrije Universiteit Brussels, finanziert durch Vrije Universiteit Brussels und Universiteit Antwerpen This conference seeks to contribute to this growing interest by exploring how specific technological developments have influenced Arendt’s thinking and shaped the content of her work. In light of the accelerating pace of 21st-century technological advancements, Arendt’s work offers a compelling example of how one can think (politically) with and through technology. Accordingly, the aim of this gathering is not only to analyze the relationship between Arendt and technology but also to conduct Arendtian thinking exercises on contemporary technological phenomena and to explore their influence on our active and mental lives.
A warm invitation to an evening with a dinner, talks and discussions in the church pavilion, organised by the Chair of (Social) Ethics and the Evangelisches Forum. The topic this time is "Destructive algorithm. On the relationship between AI, power and democracy" – all guests are invited to join in the discussion! Admission is free, and there will be a snack offered.