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The coronavirus has hit the world economy hard, with the lockdown having paralysed public life for weeks in many countries. But even with the lockdown easing up, hygiene and distance regulations still make it difficult to work together, shop, and use business services. 

ZEW’s Research Department “Labour Markets and Human Resources” recently created a new Junior Research Group, “The Integration of Migrants and Attitudes Towards the Welfare State (IMES)”. Its stated goal is to better understand the effects of immigration on the host country and the integration of migrants into the labour market.

Demographic changes are increasingly being felt in Germany as many companies struggle to find qualified applicants. Nevertheless, many unutilized options exist for easing bottlenecks in the German labour market.

Policymakers are increasingly relying on behavioural interventions with the aim of improving individual decisions. These interventions have become known as “nudges” following the similarly titled book written by Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein in 2008. Nudging methods are used, for example, to increase the willingness of individuals to pay taxes. But how effective are these measures in reality?

By 2030, renewable energy is to cover 65 percent of German energy supply. This is why the German Federal Government is planning to invite tenders for new public funds. In the past, competition for wind energy plant support was low, however. For the state, a lack of competition drives up the costs for renewable energy expansion, because it allows companies to place higher-priced bids.

In Germany, the buildings sector ranks high in terms of its amount of both final energy consumption and greenhouse gas emissions. The aim is to reduce its CO2 emissions from the current 117 million tonnes to 72 million tonnes by 2030, and to virtually zero by 2050.

For seven years now, Chinese executives have been attending ZEW’s month-long training programme ‘Fit for Partnership in Germany’. The programme, which is funded by the Federal Ministry of Economics and Energy (BMWi), is overseen by Barbara Hey, deputy head of the ZEW Department “Knowledge Transfer and Qualification Programmes”, together with her colleague Manuel Lauer.  

How can asylum seekers be successfully integrated into the Rhine-Neckar region? This question was investigated within the framework of the interdisciplinary project “Real-World Laboratory: Asylum Seekers in the Rhine-Neckar Region”, for which ZEW was a project partner.

Search engines, social networks, comparison and rating portals, and other digital platforms are increasingly transforming our lives. They make intensive use of algorithmic decision-making, especially of machine learning. Those markets in which digital platforms occur as intermediaries or market participants are also increasingly influenced by algorithms and machine learning applications.