First Socioeconomics Department PhD Workshop

By Ashley Simpson

In January, our outgoing Department Head, Professor Markus Lampe, and incoming Department Head, Professor Thomas Plümper, organized the inaugural Socioeconomics Department PhD Workshop at WU. PhD students from institutes across the department were given the opportunity to present their research and receive valuable feedback from professors and peers.

At WU, our department is spread across multiple floors and different parts of a large building, encompassing a wide range of institutes — including the Institute for Social Policy, Economics of Inequality, Institute for Spatial and Social-Ecological Transformations, Institute for Spatial and Real Estate Economics, Institute for Sociology and Social Research, Institute for Social Change and Sustainability, and our own Institute for International Political Economy, among others. Opportunities to discuss research with each other outside of structured events are rare. Yet the interdisciplinary expertise within our department makes such exchanges particularly valuable, making this workshop a welcome occasion.

Ashley presented her research on dual-class shares and financial interest groups, while Sidan presented his work on political analytical capacity and FDI. Both received thoughtful feedback from colleagues in the department. A highlight for many participants was simply learning about the breadth of research happening across the department. One particularly exciting contribution came from Viktor Weinstein (Institute for Economic and Social History), whose work examines art as a hedging instrument for risk management and portfolio insurance.

We are already looking forward to the next edition. It is a genuine strength of our department that such diverse research interests and expertise sit under one roof, and this workshop was a reminder of the value in making space to learn from one another.

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