Socioeconomics Research Seminar SS 26

Thomas Plümper and Felix Geisthardt

10.03.2026

Clint Peinhard 

UT Dallas

Law Firms in Investor-State Dispute Settlement

Clint Peinhardt is a Professor of Political Science, Public Policy and Political Economy at The University of Texas at Dallas. He received his Ph.D. in Political Science from The University of Michigan, a master’s from the Institute of Social Studies (now part of Erasmus University Rotterdam) in The Netherlands, and a B.A. from Birmingham-Southern College. His primary research interest is how politics affects international economics, and he has written about this interaction in a variety of settings, including the effects of public opinion on trade policy, the political determinants of the timing of financial liberalization, the politics of investor-state dispute settlement, and the effects of treaties on foreign investment. He teaches classes on international organizations, international political economy, international finance, as well as soccer and politics.

17.03.2026

Anne-Sophie Crépin

Stockholm Resilience Center, WU Wien

On the optimal management of weakly interacting natural resources with tipping points

Anne-Sophie Crépin is member of the Strategic Advisory Committee at the Stockholm Resilience Centre, representing the Beijer Institute of Ecological Economics. She also supervises students and teaches within the module Challenges of Environmental Decision-making within the SRC’s Master’s programme, Social-Ecological Resilience for Sustainable Development. Her research links scientific theories about the Anthropocene, regime shifts and economic dynamics and aims to answer mainly two broad questions:

1. In what way does the interplay between ecosystems and socioeconomic dynamics influence the risk of abrupt changes which could lower human well-being?

2. How can society deal with this risk in a way that sustains long term human well-being?

From this term, Crepin holds a 20 percent professorship at the Vienna University of Economics, Department of Socioeconomics.

24.03.2026

Juan Pablo Julia

University of Göteborg

The Political Consequences of Trade Shocks and Tariffs: Evidence from Argentina, 1912-1938

Juan Pablo Juliá is a postdoctoral researcher at the Department of Economy and Society, School of Business, Economics and Law, at the University of Gothenburg. He was appointed with a Broman Scholarship for exploring how tariff policies influence political dynamics in times of global economic disruption.

07.04.2026

Zackary Okun Dunivin

Baden-Württemberg Special Program for International Academic Freedom

What is the role of social identity in LLMs

Zackary Dunivin is a post-doctoral fellow at the University of Stuttgart, holding a PhD in Complex Systems (Informatics) and Sociology from Indiana University. He is a computational methodologist, cultural sociologist, and complexity scholar. Most of his research uses large, scraped, and crowdsourced data to examine culture and cultural change. What most excites him about culture is how much of human experience it touches. His work variously intersects with political communication, media studies, digital humanities, social movements, decision science, and organizational behavior.

21.04.2026

Anupam Jena

Harvard University

Random acts of medicine: how natural experiments shape our health and what we can learn from them.

Anupam B. Jena, MD, PhD, is the Joseph P. Newhouse Professor of Health Care Policy at Harvard Medical School and a physician in the Department of Medicine at Massachusetts General Hospital. He is also a faculty research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research. As an economist and physician, Dr. Jena’s research involves several areas of health economics and policy including the use of natural experiments in health care, the economics of physician behavior and the physician workforce, medical malpractice, the economics of health care productivity, and the economics of medical innovation. Dr. Jena graduated Phi Beta Kappa from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He received his MD and PhD in Economics from the University of Chicago and completed his residency in internal medicine at Massachusetts General Hospital. He is the host of the Freakonomics, MD podcast, which explores the “hidden side of health care.”

28.04.2026

Iasmin Goes

CEU

Climate Commitments or Creative Accounting: How International Organizations Navigate Conflicting Demands

Iasmin Goes is a Visiting Professor in the Department of Public Policy at CEU in Vienna. She studies how governments in the Global South navigate global economic pressures, with a focus on Latin America. Her work asks how commodity prices, capital markets, and international organizations shape domestic politics: how states design fiscal policy, attract foreign investment, produce reliable statistics, elect local representatives, and respond to climate change.

12.05.2026

Quynh Nguyen

University of Bern

Digital Monitoring and Local Environmental Governance: Evidence from a Randomized Controlled Trial in Wildfire Management

Quynh Nguyen is an associate professor at the Wyss Academy for Nature at the University of Bern (Switzerland) and is affiliated with the Institute of Political Science at the University of Bern (Switzerland). She earned her PhD in Political Science from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH Zurich)’s Center for Comparative and International Studies and was a postdoctoral fellow at the Niehaus Center for Globalization and Governance at Princeton University during the academic year 2018-19.

19.05.2026

Laura Nelson

Princeton University

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Laura Nelson studies the nineteenth century United States, focusing particularly on legal and social history. She maintains an interest in race relations, slavery, and emancipation. She co-authored a volume titled Seen/Unseen: Hidden Lives in a Community of Enslaved Georgians (UGA Press, 2021) that reveals the complex interior lives and social networks that one community of enslaved people built and sustained.

26.05.2026

Richard Bluhm

University of Stuttgart

Political violence and radicalization: Evidence from the French Revolution

Richard Bluhm is a Professor of Macroeconomics and Digital Transformation at the University of Stuttgart and a co-founder of the Political Economy of Global Development Lab. He is a CESifo affiliate and member of the AidData Research Consortium. His research interests lie at the intersection of macroeconomics, development and political economics, and urban and regional economics. He is particularly interested in the long-run evolution of economic activity across space, the role of institutions, and the unequal distribution of environmental burdens.

09.06.2026

Jerg Gutmann

University of Hamburg

Social and legal norm compliance in Europe

Jerg Gutmann is an assistant professor at the Institute of Law and Economics of the University of Hamburg and a CESifo affiliate. His research interests lie at the interface between economics, law, and politics. Jerg Gutmann is interested in the use of violence by states and its regulation. Although most of his research is empirical (including experiments and surveys), he is also interested in game theory applied to political economy questions. He has published broadly on institutional economics topics related to constitutions, culture, and the rule of law. Jerg Gutmann has advised the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, the European Union and Philippine Department of Energy, and the OECD on questions of applied statistics, impact evaluation, and measurement of institutions.

16.06.2026

Esther Sahle

University of Münster

Why you should stop using Protestantism as a predictor for human capital formation

Esther Sahle is a economic historian holding a PhD from LSE, and is a acting chair of the Economic History group at the University of Münster. Her research interests include the institutional foundations of long-distance trade, Quaker merchants, women’s Economic History, and the European Marriage Pattern.