Consider a household looking to buy a house. In attractive locations, this household competes with other buyers to purchase their desired property since the number of listed properties is limited. In this scenario, what is the impact of subsidizing a given group? What is the impact of a change in public policy that affects one group more than others? Do households respond to the policy by changing their preferences? YoHo (Young Homeownership) builds on a simple yet powerful insight: if a buyer is competing against other buyers from the same group, then changing financial conditions for that group will not change their access to the housing market but may affect how much they can pay. The insight that YoHo proposes to formalize is that if a policy targets a large share of buyers, subsidizing them will likely not lead to higher homeownership rates but to rising prices. Moving beyond market-level outcomes, YoHo will further dig deeper into the potential side effects for young buyers, such as limited access to attractive locations. YoHo will combine Norwegian register data, natural experiments, and theoretical modeling in line with the state-of-the-art housing literature to answer questions of large importance for society, the economic situation for households, and future research into affordability and homeownership. Access to the housing market is an ongoing societal challenge in many countries that involves the general public, policymakers, and academics. The work in YoHo is at the core of this challenge, with the potential to make a meaningful contribution to the debate. The research will be conducted under Professor Florian Heider's guidance at the Leibniz Institute for Financial Research SAFE, which aims to produce original, high-quality research and research-based policy advice in all finance areas, and a regular and permanent exchange with members of governments, parliaments, central banks, and supervisory authorities in Germany and Europe.

The project “The Credit Safety Net and the Costs of Credit Supply Shocks” (CSCS) examines the effects of lender-imposed credit supply dynamics on households’ ability to weather idiosyncratic income shocks that are unrelated to the business cycle. It relies on longitudinal household surveys and leverages unexpected and exogenous health shocks to identify individual-specific, random variations in exposure to credit supply shocks. Beyond the foregone satisfaction of current consumption, CSCS emphasizes welfare costs by examining not only changes in household consumption and savings but also other financial coping strategies. These include asset divestments, such as exiting homeownership, and behavioral changes related to income-generating activities, like working overtime or taking sick leave. These outcome variables are crucial for welfare considerations given their implications for health and life quality conditions, yet they are often overlooked when evaluating the costs of imperfect credit markets. The policy implications are immediate and relate to a potential need for social insurance mechanisms to provide effective insurance for households.

Improving access to long-term finance for Energy Efficiency (EE) projects is key to achieve the EU2030 targets and aligning the COVID-19 recovery to the European Green Deal. However, the lack of standardized disclosure of EE investments limits firms’ access to EE financing. Further, poor understanding of EE information in ESG ratings increases the risk of greenwashing, thus preventing a smooth development of the sustainable finance market. TranspArEEnS addresses these barriers by mainstreaming a quali-quantitative framework for standardized collection and analysis of firms’ EE and ESG information and the development of a standardized EE-ESG rating. This serves as an EE-ESG filter to inform investment and financial policy decisions with regard to portfolios’ alignment to sustainability. A unique added value of this project is to cover non-listed Small and Medium Enterprises, meeting an important market need. TranspArEEnS’ EE-ESG rating will be tested in pilot case studies and capacity building sessions with leading representatives of the financial industry and supervisors. This allows to understand barriers and opportunities for its operationalization in: i) credit risk assessment, ii) development of long-term EE-financing via securitization (covered bonds, European Secured Notes), and iii) introduction of EE-ESG considerations into monetary policies and prudential regulations. By enhancing standardized disclosure of EE investing, TranspArEEnS will decrease uncertainty in the EE and ESG market, thus promoting the scaling up of new EE financing and investment opportunities in the EU. Moreover, it will help to mitigate the risk of greenwashing thus improving financial stability. An excellent Consortium, composed of leading academic, business and financial experts, with the support of key stakeholders in EE and sustainable finance, ensures the policy and market relevance of the project’s results.

The project aims to provide a full-fledged Social Sciences and Humanities Open Cloud (SSHOC) where data, tools, and training are available and accessible for users of SSH data. The focus of the project is determined by the goal to further the innovation of infrastructural support for digital scholarship, to stimulate multidisciplinary collaboration across the various subfields of SSH and beyond, and to increase the potential for societal impact. The intention is to create a European open cloud ecosystem for social sciences and humanities, consisting of an infrastructural and human component. Development, realisation and maintenance of user-friendly tools & services, covering all aspects of the full research data cycle will be built, taking into account human-centric approach and creating links between people, data, services and training. SSHOC will encourage secure environments for sharing and using sensitive and confidential data. Where relevant, the results of EOSC-hub H2020 project will be adopted. The SSHOC will contribute to the Open Science agenda and realising the EOSC. This project aligns with prescribed cluster activities in order to realise a SSH cloud that can fully encompass infrastructural support for the study of social and cultural phenomena. Moreover, the planned SSH Cloud is instrumental to Europe's multilingualism; data in Europe is often available in multiple languages thus making a strong incentive for comparative research of the societal and cultural phenomena that are reflected in language use. The SSH Cloud shall contribute to innovations stemming from the coupling of these heterogeneous data types - and work on the Interoperability principle of FAIR.