Economic Behavior & Governance (EB&Go)

Linkage with research foci of the university

Environment, climate and food: Due to the focus of the research focus on scarcities, there is also a need for an economic toolkit. Conversely, many of those who participate in the research focus have a high intrinsic motivation to apply methods and insights from behavioral and institutional economics as well as econometrics to the subject area of environment and resources.
Empirical research on education and higher education: On the one hand, the EB&Go research focus contributes to the branch of research that investigates the effect of education on behavior and opportunities as well as of educational institutions (for example, on the regional economy). On the other hand, it also researches the determinants of educational decisions and educational success. These relationships between the department's EB&Go research focus and the university's Empirical Research on Education and Higher Education are institutionally consolidated in several ways and are thus long-term.
There are further relationships to three research foci that make sense to work on from the perspective of EB&Go in general, but in which currently only individual persons or projects of the department are concretely involved. These are, first, energy supply systems of the future, i.e., a focus where research on energy efficiency threatens to run into the void if the incentives for implementing the new technologies are not considered as well as the relevant political-economic processes. Second, there is cultural and gender research, because economic experiments lend themselves to identifying gendered behaviors as well as exploring their causes. And third, there are references to the research focus on social policy, development policy and decent work, in particular to the Research Network for Social Law and Social Policy (FoSS), with which there is close cooperation, especially from a legal perspective.