In an effort to boost industrial competitiveness and address societal challenges through excellence research, the European Framework Programmes (FPs) have been concentrating resources in a core of top-performing research institutions. But pursuing excellence at the expense of cohesion is a risky endeavour, as it can exacerbate inter-regional economic disparities. FPrevision4cohesion aims to unravel the impact of competitive FP research funding and different policy designs on the structural and spatial dynamics of the European scientific network. Developing a comprehensive picture of FPs’ influence on knowledge distribution and inequality is critically needed if we are to avoid deepening existing innovation divides and guide cohesion efforts in a targeted way. If convergence is understood not as mere redistribution of funds from core to peripheral regions, but as sustained support for the periphery's research and innovation capacity, we need deeper insights into the FPs' role in consolidating or fragmenting collaborative core-periphery ties. The project will adopt a novel counterfactual analysis, comparing for the first time the impact of funded to non-funded FP projects using network science techniques. This approach offers significant advancements over existing studies which rely almost exclusively on funded FP collaborations and are therefore limited in their capacity to isolate causal effects. The analysis is meant to not merely quantify impact, but also highlight how the structural links between core and peripheral organisations could be strengthened, and how different policy instruments with a top-down vs bottom-up intervention logic influence the process. FPrevision4cohesion aspires to guide both research and policy in balancing competitive programmes with convergence efforts, and directly responds to recent calls for more research on synergies.

There are enormous differences in productivity both across countries and across firms within the same country. Not only is the average firm less productive in poor countries, the allocation of resources across firms is also less efficient. Good management is understood as one of the key determinants of firm performance. Why don't management best practices spread from good firms to bad ones and from rich countries to poor ones? In order to explain management practices and productivity at the macroeconomic level, we need to understand where good managers come from and how they are allocated across firms. I propose a new research agenda of the macroeconomics of managers. I will build three quantifiable theories to describe the market for manager skills and estimate them in new longitudinal data on the universe of firms and top managers in Germany (1991-2021) and Hungary (1980-2021). I will study the increased demand for manager skills after economic liberalization of the 1990s, the geographic and other frictions stopping managers from reaching their full potential at their ideal firm, and the spread of trading practices between firms as managers move. My research will show how the misallocation of manager skills across firms, space, and time can contribute to lower aggregate productivity.

Education Economics Network – EdEN EdEN marks the start of an enhanced cooperation in the field of education economics between three top ranked economics of education research groups in EU-15 countries and a promising group in the Widening Countries. The deep cooperation will boost the publication and research capacities of the cooperating institutions in general, and the leading institution in particular. Education economics is one of the most important applied economics fields that provide direct evidence to policy makers on educational issues. The proposed project focuses on three clusters of methodologies – program evaluation, structural modeling and efficiency analysis – and fosters cooperation between the institutions along more specific research lines within these clusters. The project also increases the awareness of the education economics among Ph.D. students from the participating countries as well as at building a stronger network of already practicing education economists within the specific research lines.

EDUCHANGE aims to become one of the first ever projects to conduct simultaneous field experiments in four strategically selected countries (Denmark, Germany, Hungary, Iceland) with the goal to reduce inequality at the educational transition from compulsory to secondary education and at the transition to higher education. While experimental intervention studies have become more common in sociology and economics in recent years, EDUCHANGE will address five critical limitations in this literature: 1) No information or career guidance experiment with the goal to reduce inequality at educational transitions has ever been implemented in different countries with a harmonized design. This is puzzling given the importance of institutional context for the generation of inequalities in education 2) The majority of experiments focus on the transition to higher education while neglecting earlier transitions which are particularly relevant in tracked European education systems 3) Previous experiments have hardly considered the role and knowledge of professional counsellors 4) Previous interventions have mainly focused on updating students’ biased perceptions of costs and returns while neglecting other psychological and social barriers 5) Advances in multimedia technologies have only to a limited extent been integrated in previous experiments. Key outcomes of EDUCHANGE will include: (a) A more nuanced conceptual understanding of how career guidance and information provision can help to reduce inequalities (b) A comparative study of students’ subjective evaluation of costs, returns and probabilities of success and psychological barriers they attach to different educational alternatives in a comparative perspective (c) Knowledge about to what degree institutional context has an impact on whether information provision and career guidance can reduce inequality at two key educational transitions – and potentially affect persistence at the next level.