To meet societal and economic challenges, health and care welfare regimes will need to become much more focused on the outcomes that matter to people and deliver these programmes effectively and efficiently. Central to this goal is the need to accurately measure outcomes and reflect the value of those outcomes. We propose a cross-country study to measure outcomes in the field of long-term care (LTC). We will use a care-related outcome tool, ASCOT, to assess the comparative effectiveness and efficiency of non-institutional LTC (e.g. home care) for older adults and their informal carers in Austria, England and Finland. The study has four analytical workpackages (WPs) with these goals: Establish a valid basis for international comparisons of LTC-outcomes in non-institutional settings, by developing rigorously translated and tested versions of ASCOT. Generate country-specific ASCOT utility weights and explore variations in preferences for ASCOT quality of life domains across countries. Explore variations in ASCOT quality of life (QoL) within and between countries, providing evidence on QoL-outcomes of services for service users and their carers. Explore and compare the relative costs, efficiency and cost-effectiveness of specific LTC services. We will use econometric methods, combining estimates of the effect of services on QoL and service cost. This study should strengthen the research base and help guide policy-makers and practitioners to make outcomes-focused, economically-sound decisions about LTC. It will also provide useful tools for future evaluations. One of the applicants will lead each WP, supported by a country lead and team of researchers.

Networks appear in many guises in modern day life—in transportation networks, communication networks, social networks, and many others. Fast algorithms to optimize the way we design and exploit these networks have become increasingly important, especially as the size of these networks grow. Fundamental research on the subject, focused on finding and analyzing algorithms with provable performance guarantees, is long established. But there is undeniably a disconnect with practice, where heuristic approaches are the norm. I will develop algorithms from the rigorous standpoint, but with the explicit goal of obtaining algorithms that are simple, fast, and based on insightful relaxations of the problem—in short, usable. These properties will aid in the transfer of key insights into more applied areas. With this goal in mind, I will focus on key problems that are of central theoretical importance, but also relevant to practical problems in telecommunications and logistics. Generalized flow is a central model in combinatorial optimization, and has been intensively studied since the sixties. It captures settings where flow is lost as it traverses the network, and has numerous applications. I intend to develop faster and simpler algorithms for this problem, at the same time taking a step towards a key open problem in the theory of linear programming. Connectivity problems, where the goal is to find the cheapest possible network subject to certain connectivity constraints, yield some of the most fundamental problems in the theory of network design. The problems I will study are computationally difficult, but fast algorithms that give provably near-optimal solutions are of key importance. Robust network design is a general framework for modelling varying or uncertain network utilization, a crucial feature of communication and logistic networks. I will attack conjectures about the optimality of certain simple algorithms, and the strength of certain natural relaxations.

The birth of philosophy in ancient Greece, the fall of the Roman Empire, the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, the Industrial Revolution, the Holocaust: such emblematic historical moments are regarded as the building blocks of a quintessentially European past. But how "European" is this past if many in the non-European world have claimed competing representations of it as their own, and if many in the European world, in turn, have appropriated non-European claims to bolster their own sense of identity? This CRP argues that, far from being Europes exclusive property, the pasts constructed through such emblematic moments were shaped in global circulations of meaning, and that their ongoing significance is the result of situated co-productions in Europe and East Asia. Our aim is to trace how intellectual entanglements across the Eurasian region from 1600 to the present shaped the conceptualization of historical temporalities, or "chronotypes." To substantiate this hypothesis, we examine four such chronotypes, those of "awakening and rebirth, "recurrence and return," "decline and fall, and "timelessness and permanence." Through academic works, exhibitions, teaching modules, public lectures and discussions, produced by an advanced postdoctoral team, the CRP will impact both scholars and non-academic stakeholders by piercing culturalist myths of nationally-owned "pasts" in Europe and East Asia.

The administrative state is central to democratic governance - it connects citizens to the state. The current age of political turbulence - expressed through citizen dissatisfaction and populist politics - represents a fundamental challenge to the authority of institutions of the administrative state and requires inquiry into processes of citizen dis- and reconnection with the state. The ReConnect study investigates how the age of ‘administrative turbulence’, a result of changes in the political environment, cumulative side-effects of decades of public sector reform and changing citizen demands, have led to calls for more ‘responsive’ administrative state institutions. In particular, ReConnect investigates variation in attitudes and demands by citizens and politicians towards the administrative state and explores how the administrative state has sought to become more responsive to citizens and politicians. RECONNECT focuses on five distinct dimensions of the administrative state covering constitutional, regulatory, enabling, consumer-protecting and consulting dimensions. These dimensions express different, but reinforcing elements of citizenship in democratic governance. Using focus groups and polling data to understand citizen attitudes towards the administrative state and documentary and interviews research regarding political and administrative actors, ReConnect generates new knowledge to compare and explain variation across dimensions of the administrative state and EU member state jurisdictions. ReConnect contributes to academic and practitioner knowledge and debates regarding the future of the administrative state in the current age of turbulence. In doing so, ReConnect points to ways how citizens can be reconnected to the administrative state in particular and wider democratic governance more generally.

To meet societal and economic challenges, health and care welfare regimes will need to become much more focused on the outcomes that matter to people and deliver these programmes effectively and efficiently. Central to this goal is the need to accurately measure outcomes and reflect the value of those outcomes. We propose a cross-country study to measure outcomes in the field of long-term care (LTC). We will use a care-related outcome tool, ASCOT, to assess the comparative effectiveness and efficiency of non-institutional LTC (e.g. home care) for older adults and their informal carers in Austria, England and Finland. The study has four analytical workpackages (WPs) with these goals: " Establish a valid basis for international comparisons of LTC-outcomes in non-institutional settings, by developing rigorously translated and tested versions of ASCOT. " Generate country-specific ASCOT utility weights and explore variations in preferences for ASCOT quality of life domains across countries. " Explore variations in ASCOT-quality of life (QoL) within and between countries, providing evidence on QoL for service users, carers and the relationship between them, as well as QoL inequalities. " Explore and compare the relative costs, efficiency and cost-effectiveness of specific LTC services. We will use econometric methods, combining estimates of the effect of services on QoL and service cost. This study should strengthen the research base and help guide policymakers and practitioners to make outcomes-focused, economically-sound decisions about LTC. It will also provide useful tools for future evaluations.