Automation, Innovation and Technology
Information Systems
- Head of the team: Prof. Dr. Stefan Kirn (University of Hohenheim).
- The team investigates automated IT processes and their integration in the workflow of firms and in the public sector. Automation of IT processes improves the quality of life; however, it also results in structural changes on the labour market and it may lead to increases in skill premiums and wage gaps.
- One of the ongoing projects, "UrbanLife+", which is supported by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF), is dedicated to analyzing the different extent by which different parts of society are able to interrelate with new technologies.
Growth and Distribution
- Head of the team and speaker of INEPA: Prof. Dr. Prettner (University of Hohenheim).
- The work if the team centers around the following topics: gender equity and economic development (Bloom et al., 2015, Prettner and Strulik, 2017); inequality and status perceptions (Hof and Prettner, 2016); human capital accumulation (Prettner and Schäfer, 2016); and the effects of automation on economic growth and inequality (Prettner, 2016, Prettner and Strulik, 2017).
- Ongoing research focuses on automatisation and the shifts in income distribution between different skill groups of workers, the effects of demographic change (mainly aging and migration) on inequality, the evolution of global inequality between countries, and testing the biases and efficiency of estimation methods.
Innovation Economics
- Head of the team: Prof. Dr. Andreas Pyka (University of Hohenheim).
- To address knowledge transfers between different countries and long term economic development, together with coauthors, the team developed the economic growth model TEVECON (e.g. Saviotti and Pyka, 2004a, b, 2008).
- In the latest extension (Saviotti et al. 2016), the dynamics of the income distribution are explicity included in the TEVECON model by considering different employment prospects and different wages in the various co-existing sectors.
- The main focus of the team is on the interrelations between innovation, complexity, and inequality.