Socioeconomics Research Seminar WS 25
Thomas Plümper and Felix Geisthardt
28.10.2025
Roberto Valli
European University Institute
Assimilation, Emigration and Mobilization: Elite Responses to Territorial Conquest
Roberto Valli is Max Weber Fellow at the Department of Political and Social Sciences. By training, he is a political scientist specializing in the political economy of identity, conflict, and religion. He was Postdoctoral Research Associate at Princeton University during the 2024-2025 academic year. Before, he earned his PhD in 2024 in the International Conflict Research group at ETH Zurich. In the summer of 2025, he was a visiting researcher at the University of Konstanz, and in 2022 he visited the Institute for Eastern European and Eurasian Studies at UC Berkeley.
04.11.2025
Thiago Almeida
Jean Monnet Center of Excellence UFMG and Pontifical Catholic University of Minas Gerais
Critical Raw Materials Law and Diplomacy: A Perspective from the Global South
Thiago Almeida is Professor of International Law at the Jean Monnet Center of Excellence UFMG and Pontifical Catholic University of Minas Gerais, Brazil. He is also a Lawyer and Specialist at the Development Bank of Minas Gerais, Brazil. Currently Prof. Almeida is a resident of the 2nd Postdoctoral Program in climate finance and trade protectionism of critical minerals for the energy and digital transitions at the Law School of the Federal University of Ceará (2025-2026) and visiting fellow at the Amsterdam Center for International Law (ACIL), University of Amsterdam (UvA), Netherlands (2025).
11.11.2025
Guido Tiemann
HIS Wien
The Deserving and the Undeserving. Evidence from a Conjoint Experiment
Guido Tiemann is a political scientist at the Institute for Advanced Studies (IHS), Vienna, specializing in electoral behavior, parties, and democratic representation. His research blends theoretical and empirical methods to explore how voters make decisions under risk, uncertainty, and information constraints, and how institutional and contextual factors shape party competition in Europe. Recent work includes studies on directional voting, party identification, and the effects of economic perceptions on democratic legitimacy. Dr. Tiemann has led projects on European integration, populism, and vote choice, and publishes widely in prestigious journals in comparative politics and electoral studies.
18.11.2025
Felix Schaff
London School of Economics
Before the U-Curve: Intra-Family Roots of Preindustrial Gender Inequality
Felix Schaff examines policy-relevant questions at the intersection of economics, history, and political economy. In particular, he studies the long-run evolution and determinants of wealth and gender inequality in Europe, combining newly collected archival evidence with modern microeconometric and national accounting approaches. By linking historical evidence to contemporary concerns, his work contributes to debates in economics and the social sciences on inequality, development, and institutional change.
25.11.2025
Raya Muttarak
University of Bologna
Fertility, Mortality and Migration in a Warming World: Implications for Future Population Dynamics
Raya Muttarak is the former IIASA Population and Just Societies (POPJUS) Program director and acting Migration and Sustainable Development (MIG) Research Group leader. She is currently professor of Demography and the Department of Statistical Sciences at the University of Bologna, Italy but still maintains close ties with the Population and Just Societies Program at IIASA. She has also been director of Population, Environment, and Sustainable Development at the Wittgenstein Centre for Demography and Global Human Capital, a cooperation between IIASA, the University of Vienna, and the Austrian Academy of Sciences, since 2017. In 2022, she was appointed editor of the journal, Population and Development Review.
02.12.2025
Giovanna Invernizzi
Bocconi University
Party Factions and Candidate Selection
Giovanna Invernizzi is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Social and Political Sciences at Bocconi University and an Affiliate Fellow at the Stigler Center at Chicago Booth. Her research uses game theory, experimental and statistical methods to study political institutions and behavior. Substantively, I focus on political parties and electoral competition, intra-party factions and candidate selection, and policymaking and accountability. She previously was an Assistant Professor at Duke, and a Postdoc at Collegio Carlo Alberto.
09.12.2025
Jane Humphries
University of Oxford
Towards an economic history of caring labour
Jane Humphries is a Professor of Economic History and a Fellow of All Souls College. Her interests include labour markets, industrialization and the links between the family and the economy. She has published extensively on gender, the family and the history of women's work and is also interested in the causes and consequences of economic growth and structural change.
12.12.2025
Georg Kanitsar
IHS Wien
Behavioral Trust Across Unemployment Trajectories: Effects of Reemployment and Unemployment Duration by Socioeconomic Group
Georg Kanitsar is a Senior Researcher at IHS since February 2023 and part of the research group Social Cohesion and Polarization. He holds a PhD in Sociology (2018) and a MSc in Economics (2013), both from the University of Vienna. Before joining IHS, he was an Assistant Professor at the Vienna University of Economics and Business and a Doctoral Researcher at the University of Vienna.
His current research focuses on the interplay between educational and social mobility patterns among children of immigrants and, on the other hand, the discrimination and attitudes of the native-born population. This focus is embedded in a broader interest in social stratification, migration, and social trust.
13.01.2026
Alejandro Quiroz Flores
University of Hertfordshire
Can Machine Learning Algorithms Detect Domestic Violence?
Alejandro Quiroz Flores is the Director of the Centre for Research in Public Health and Community Care (CRIPACC) at the University of Hertfordshire.
Previously, Prof. Flores was Professor of Government and Deputy Director of the Business and Local Government Data Research Centre at the University of Essex. Between 2019 and 2024, Prof. Flores was the Chief Scientific Adviser to Essex County Council, based at the Institute for Analytics and Data Science, University of Essex.
Alex Flores obtained his PhD in Politics at New York University and his MPhil at the University of Oxford.
20.01.2026
Richard Bluhm
Georg-August Universität Göttingen
Political Violence and Radicalization: Evidence from the French Revolution
Richard Bluhm is a Humbolt Foundation Lynen Fellow at the University of California San Diego and an Assistant Professor (Akademischer Rat) at Leibniz University Hannover’s Institute of Macroeconomics. Richard's research is broadly situated in economic growth and political economy, usually with a focus on developing countries. Many of his current projects use geospatial data to study problems in regional and urban development.
SRS Program File