How will the future labor market look and are European education systems endowing the next generation with the skills they will need to succeed? These questions are at the heart of a new research project at the Catholic University of Eichstätt-Ingolstadt.
What are the links between migrant career prospects and their working abroad in the EU? This was a guiding question of a research project coordinated by the University of Bamberg. The project aimed to develop a long-term approach to supporting migrant worker integration and combating labor shortages in the EU.
How can Europe efficiently achieve its goals in the regulation of artificial intelligence? And how can the EU itself use AI for this purpose? In the AI4POL project, an international research team will investigate whether EU regulations actually support its citizens. Furthermore, the team will develop AI tools and data science methods with which policymakers and regulators can better evaluate the effects of their legislation as well as potential threats posed by technological developments in non-democratic states. The project is funded by the EU Horizon Europe program.
The innovative strength of a society depends on the level of academic freedom. An international team involving the Technical University of Munich (TUM) has now proven this relationship for the first time. The researchers analyzed patent applications and patent citations in a sample from around 160 countries over the 1900–2015 period in relation to indicators used in the Academic Freedom Index. In view of the global decline in academic freedom over the past 10 years, the researchers predict a loss in innovative output.
What effect do economic sanctions have on the countries affected, such as Russia or Iran? What impact do they have on the sanctioning states? And is there possibly an ideal coalition of sanction partners? Economists from Würzburg, Kiel, Berlin and Bielefeld have analysed these questions. They have now published their findings in the renowned journal "Economic Policy".
Most people do not believe the disinformation spread by Russia about the war in Ukraine, even if they regularly use social media. Instead, the decisive factor in the efficacy of this propaganda is whether a person is fundamentally receptive to conspiracy narratives. These are the findings of an international research team led by the Technical University of Munich (TUM) in around 20 European and American countries. The respective proportion of people who believe Russian assertions differs substantially.
The establishment of a new Center - Think Space Ukraine (TSU) or Denkraum Ukraine (DU) – aims to consolidate and advance Regensburg’s diverse expertise on Ukraine's culture, economy, politics, and law. The German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) has pledged substantial support, injecting about 2.5 million euros from April 2024 to March 2028. This underscores the commitment to fostering the expansion of the numerous connections and collaborations with Ukrainian scholars that are already in place at the University of Regensburg (UR) in the realms of research, teaching, and knowledge transfer.
Better alignment with the market is one of the goals pursued by the EU’s Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) in recent decades. One of the measures used to achieve this was to decouple direct payments from production. Agricultural economists at the Technical University of Munich (TUM) have now found that this form of direct payments makes farms more productive. Despite higher productivity, the environmental impact remains at a comparable level.
A simulation study conducted by a team from the Technical University of Munich (TUM) demonstrates that a soft drink tax in Germany would have significant positive effects. In all of the simulated variants evaluated, less sugar was consumed and the rate of illness dropped. This would be a way to reduce costs to the national economy and alleviate the burden on the health care system. There is, however, a difference between taxes aimed at reducing soft drink consumption and taxes aimed at bringing about changes in product formulation.
What makes people particularly susceptible to disinformation and how can we prevent falling for it? These questions are the focus of the new research project on innovative communication strategies for intervention and prevention in disinformation campaigns (IKIP), coordinated by Prof. Dr. Friederike Herrmann, who is a Professor of Journalism and Communication Studies at the Catholic University of Eichstätt-Ingolstadt (KU). The project is funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research.