The Cluster of Excellence ECONtribute: Markets and Public Policy at the Universities of Bonn and Cologne will receive a further seven years of funding as part of the Excellence Strategy of the German federal and state governments. This was confirmed yesterday by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German Research Foundation) and the the German Science and Humanities Council (Wissenschaftsrat, WR) with the publication of the Excellence Commission’s selection results in Bonn.
We are delighted by the recognition of top-level research at the Faculty of Management, Economics and Social Sciences (WiSo) and congratulate all researchers and staff whose commitment has made this success possible.
ECONtribute: Responses to Economic and Societal Crises
The Cluster of Excellence ECONtribute: Markets & Public Policy addresses urgent societal and technological challenges such as global financial crises, rising inequality, political polarisation, digitalisation and climate change. Around 150 researchers from economics and related disciplines are developing innovative approaches to analyse markets and policy and to find solutions to these challenges. The research focuses on individuals — their beliefs, expectations and sense of justice — as key factors for better understanding markets and deriving well-founded policy recommendations for shaping markets and policy interventions.
“The decision to continue funding confirms the high quality of our work, our international visibility, and the interdisciplinary networks we have built over the past few years,” says Professor Dr Pia Pinger, spokesperson at the University of Cologne. “The continued funding enables us to expand our successful research and further strengthen the exchange of knowledge between society, science, and policy,” adds Professor Dr Matthias Heinz, also a member of the Cologne spokesperson team.
In the second funding phase, the researchers at the Cluster of Excellence will increasingly examine the conditions under which political measures gain public acceptance. ECONtribute will also focus on how economies can become more resilient during times of crisis — and how short-term political decisions can be reconciled with long-term goals.
The Cluster of Excellence is jointly run by the Universities of Bonn and Cologne, with participation from the Max Planck Institute for Research on Collective Goods. All research activities are coordinated under the umbrella of the joint Reinhard Selten Institute (RSI).
Overall, the University of Cologne is once again highly successful in the Excellence Strategy: Five Clusters of Excellence will be funded in the next funding period. In addition to ECONtribute, the following Clusters will be funded for seven years: CECAD for aging research, CEPLAS for plant sciences, DYNAVERSE for astrophysics, ECONtribute for economics and ML4Q for quantum research. These Clusters reflect the academic fields of the natural sciences, life sciences, humanities and social sciences represented at the University of Cologne.
