Events 2015

Begrüßung und Einführung: Wolfgang Merkel, WZB

Die Demokratie, die repräsentative Politik, steckt in einer Krise. Eine stetige Entpolitisierung ist zu beobachten; das Interesse an Wahlen und an Parteien geht rapide zurück. So wird es oft dargestellt – Simon Tormey hat eine andere Interpretation.

Discussants: Ruud Koopmans and Justin Valasek

Moderated by Wolfgang Merkel

The relationship between "Global Constitutionalism” and Critical Theory is the subject of a workshop organized  by Mattias Kumm, Rainer Forst and Seyla Benhabib on December 11th, 10 a.m. to 5:45 p.m. in Berlin, Heilig-Geist-Kapelle (Spandauer Str. 1). Has the globalization of public law, that claims to be guided by basic commitments to human rights, democracy and the rule of law, helped to realize the emancipatory potential of the constitutionalist tradition? Or has constitutionalist rhetoric merely legitimated new or helped to cover up old forms of repression?

Die Tagung befasst sich mit zentralen Fragen der Chancengleichheit der Schulsysteme in den deutschen Bundesländern aus einer juristischen und bildungswissenschaftlichen Perspektive.

Immer noch tut Deutschland zu wenig gegen Bildungsarmut. Viele Kinder und Jugendliche verlassen das Schulsystem mit geringen Kompetenzen und ohne Abschluss. Wer aus einer sozial schwächeren Familie kommt oder einen Migrationshintergrund hat, besitzt nach wie vor schlechtere Chancen, eine höhere Schulbildung oder das Abitur zu erreichen. Kinder mit Lernbeeinträchtigungen werden trotz Verpflichtung zur Inklusion weiter an recht teuren Förderschulen unterrichtet. Die Bildungsausgaben in Deutschland liegen zudem deutlich unter dem OECD-Durchschnitt anderer westeuropäischer Staaten.

In his new book, The New Flagship University: Changing the Paradigm from Global Rankings to National Relevancy (Palgrave Macmillan) John Douglass provides an expansive vision for leading national universities and an alternative narrative to global rankings and World Class Universities that dominate the attention of many universities, as well as government ministries.

While the literature on charitable giving and fundraising has made
signgificant progress over the last years, it has focussed exclusively
on small donations. The real action for large (arts) institutions is,
however, in big donations about which the literature knows next to nothing.

Concerns about neighborhood erosion and conflict in ethnically diverse settings occupy scholars, policy makers and pundits alike; but the empirical evidence is inconclusive. This presentation introduces the contested boundaries hypothesis as a refined contextual explanation focused on poorly-defined boundaries between ethnic and racial groups. We argue that neighborhood conflict is more likely to occur at fuzzy boundaries defined as interstitial or transitional areas sandwiched between two homogeneous communities.

Das Mentoringprogramm für Nachwuchswissenschaftlerinnen der Economic Science Association (ESA) stellt dieses Mal Experimente zur Untersuchung von menschlichem Verhalten in den Mittelpunkt seines Treffens.

The workshop discusses the emergence of policy fields from a comparative and theoretical perspective. The aim of the workshop is to continue the systematic analysis of policy fields which was initiated in spring 2014 during the annual symposium of the DVPW section “Policy Analysis and Administrative Sciences”. Some contributions to this symposium were recently published in a special issue of the German journal “der moderne staat”.

Weltoffen und kiezig, hip und bodenständig, kantig und smart – all das zeichnet Berlin aus. Gleichzeitig stehen in der wachsenden Stadt Berlin die gewählte Politik und die Stadtgesellschaft vor großen Herausforderungen, den Wandel hin zu einer lebenswerten Metropole für alle zu gestalten. Dafür braucht es den Zusammenhalt ihrer Bewohner, das Miteinander von Einheimischen und Dazugekommenen, von Jungen und Alten, von Stärkeren und Schwächeren. Wie fördert man Engagement und breite politische Beteiligung? Wie eröffnet man möglichst vielen den Zugang zu guter Ausbildung und guter Arbeit?

Einladung

19.-20.11.2015, Wissenschaftszentrum Berlin für Sozialforschung (WZB)

To achieve a balance between needs and resources older people combine resources from the state, the market and non-monetized social relations. Each has comparative advantages and limitations. The talk will contrast top-down approaches that fragment needs and institutional resources by presenting  bottom up view of how individuals integrate resources in different ways to meet different ways. The logic has significant implications for restructuring public expenditure in a time of fiscal conflict.

Es ist längst gesellschaftlicher Konsens: neue Technologien, der Abbau von Hierarchien in Unternehmen, Fachkräftemangel und demografischer Wandel machen eine kontinuierliche Qualifizierung der Arbeitnehmerinnen und Arbeitnehmer notwendig. Doch auch in der Weiterbildung gibt es eine soziale Spaltung: Gut ausgebildete junge Männer mit Vollzeitstellen können ihr Wissen ständig auffrischen. Wer Teilzeit arbeitet, geringfügig beschäftigt ist und keinen guten Schulabschluss hat, bekommt weniger die Chance zur Weiterbildung.

Die Digitalisierung verändert die Wissenschaft. Webbasierte Infrastrukturen ermöglichen neue Formen der kollaborativen Wissensproduktion und ebenso pluralisieren sich mit dem Einzug des Web 2.0 die Publikations- und Rezeptionspraktiken von Wissen. Inwieweit wirkt jedoch die Digitalisierung bis in die Leistungsbewertung hinein? Bedeutet „digital scholarship“ eine Kriterienverschiebung im wissenschaftlichen Anerkennungssystem und/oder in institutionellen Evaluationsverfahren? Wo verlaufen die Grenzen des ‚digital divide‘ in der Wissenschaft und mit welchen Folgen?

Buzz words like industry 4.0 or digital capitalism have become popular to allude to new technologies and challenges to prevailing production systems. While the internet is central to the digital revolution, the links between the internet and changes in the organization of production and service economies are still not very clear.

No matter if it's music or books, food or opinions - Big Data knows what you love. Or who you love. It will help bring down crime, empower the weak, eradicate poverty or overcome deadly diseases. This hype laden rhetoric surrounding Big Data oozes missionary zeal. That's partly because the conversation on the issue is dominated by those who stand to gain most from it: the high priests from Silicon Valley, corporate tech evangelists, and their start-up disciples around the globe, as well as their supporting acts in the wider business world, media and government.

15.00 Uhr Begrüßung durch
PD Dr. Elke Holst
Forschungsdirektorin Gender Studies am Deutschen Institut für
Wirtschaftsforschung (DIW Berlin)

Length-biased sampling is a pervasive problem in population research.
Applications range from methodological problems (e.g., how do you pick the
right unit of analysis for a survey) to conceptual insights (e.g., the
relationship between the demographic concepts of "period" and "cohort").
This workshop will discuss these issues using a diverse set of examples
drawn from social science research.

Die Veranstaltung findet am 02. November 2015 statt in der Villa Neukölln, Hermannstraße 233, 12049 Berlin. Beginn ist 19 Uhr.

Neukölln ist eine Großstadt. Der Bezirk hat mehr Einwohner als Kiel oder Mannheim. Hier stellen sich die gesellschaftlichen Fragen des 21. Jahrhunderts: Gibt es Arbeit für alle, und zwar befriedigende Arbeit? Können wir allen gute Bildungschancen bieten? Können wir die kulturelle, soziale und weltanschauliche Vielfalt nutzen, anstatt uns voneinander abzuschotten?

Introduction: Anette Fasang

Every affluent country has experienced substantial changes in partnership behavior – delayed and foregone marriage, increased cohabitation, increased divorce and separation, and the formation of new partnerships. Because shifts in partnership behavior often occur in the context of parenthood, they produce increasingly complex families and households where biological ties, coresidence, and legal rights and obligations do not necessarily coincide. This lecture examines the role of cohabitation itself in the formation of complex families.

Constitutional democracies recurrently grapple with fear-inducing tests. Drawing on challenges posed during the first half of the twentieth-century by economic collapse, unprecendeted violence, and anti-parliamentary dictatorships, and seeking to surmount treatments of emergency and exception rooted in the writing of Carl Schmitt, the talk will place today's conundrums within a historical and analytical context.

Why is it forbidden to sell and buy organs? Why is the exchange of kidneys that leads to many successful transplants allowed in some countries such as the US, but not in others like Germany? Which markets or transactions we allow, affects the choices that people have, and how they may pursue their goals. Kidney exchange would seem needlessly complex if we instead allowed kidneys to be bought and sold; but this is illegal everywhere except in the Islamic Republic of Iran. There are many other transactions that are repugnant or forbidden, and this differs between countries.

Big data methods provide several new methodological opportunities to inquire social phenomena. Only very recently have scholars in international relations used such methods to analyze, for instance, bilateral trade networks. So far, however, international institutions, like treaties or International Organizations, have not been a field where big data methods were applied. The current paper seeks to highlight the advantages of big data methods, both from a research design and analytical perspective, for the study of international treaties.

Die Städte spielen bei der Umsetzung der Energiewende eine Schlüsselrolle. Aufgrund ihres enormen Energieverbrauchs und ihrer hohen CO2-Emissionen stehen sie in besonderer Verantwortung, sich viel stärker als bisher in die Umsetzung der Energiewende einzubringen. Als Wirtschaftsstandorte und Innovationslabore bergen sie hierfür auch große Chancen.

The aim of this workshop is to bring together researchers from Germany and the UK to exchange information and insights regarding their research approach and findings on skill formation in context. While in Germany the transition through the education system and into employment is well structured and organised through the dual system, the UK adopts a more liberal approach characterised by a lack of regulation and little support for young people not attending university.

Alle zwei Jahre vergibt das WZB den mit 100.000 Euro dotierten A.SK Social Science Award. Der Preis wird vom chinesischen Unternehmerpaar Angela und Shu Kai Chan gestiftet und würdigt wissenschaftliche Arbeiten, die besondere Relevanz für politische oder wirtschaftliche Reformen haben.

Zum dritten Mal lädt das WZB alle ehemaligen Mitarbeiterinnen und Mitarbeiter zum jährlichen Ehemaligentreffen an das WZB ein. Das Treffen bietet die Möglichkeit zum Wiedersehen und Knüpfen neuer Kontakte - nicht nur während des optionalen Speed-Datings. Sie haben früher am WZB gearbeitet und keine Einladung erhalten? Dann kontaktieren Sie uns.

Orlando Patterson will present an excerpt from his latest book The Cultural Matrix: Understanding Black Youth (co-edited with Ethan Fosse, Harvard University Press, 2015), which addresses a uniquely American paradox: the socioeconomic crisis, segregation, and social isolation of disadvantaged black youth, on the one hand, and their extraordinary integration and prominence in popular culture on the other.

The seminar will be followed by a panel discussion. The topic is "Effective RCTs: Achieving the gold standard in empirical social sciences". The three panelists are Esther Duflo (MIT), Raji Jayaraman (ESMT Berlin) and Felix Elwert (University of Wisconsin-Madison and WZB). The discussion is moderated by Dorothea Kübler (WZB).

Innerhalb des aktuellen Diskurses um die Digitalisierung der Arbeit erscheint das Thema Industrie 4.0 als besonders technik- und ingenieurlastig und als eigenständig deutsche Erfindung. Der Vortrag wirft einen kritischen Blick auf diese vorherrschende Sichtweise, er gibt einen diskursanalytischen Einblick in die Ursprünge, Intentionen und Akteure sowie den Verlauf der Debatte.

Für Berlin stehen im Energiebereich gleich mehrere Herausforderungen an. Die Vergabe der Gaskonzession ist vor Gericht, das Stromnetz muss in einem Konzessionsverfahren diskriminierungsfrei und transparent vergeben werden. Der Senat hat sich als politisches Ziel die Rekommunalisierung auf die Fahnen geschrieben. Und nebenbei soll in Berlin auch noch die Energiewende geschafft werden. Welchen Beitrag leistet die Sozialforschung in diesem komplexen Feld? Wo kann sie Innovationen anstoßen und wie sieht das Wechselspiel mit der Politik aus?

This interdisciplinary panel will focus on the community of Israeli immigrants in Berlin, the largest community of Israeli immigrants in Germany. Situating the community within Berlin’s rich multiculturalism, the panel speakers will juxtapose memory studies along with diaspora, immigration and integration theories, seeking to understand how, given the particular part Germany played in Jewish-Israeli history, Israeli immigrants reconcile the past-present duality faced when living in the city.

Veranstaltung in der Kolloquienreihe Wissenschaft und Gesellschaft: Bleibt alles anders?

Der Vortrag behandelt Big Data als Datenphänomen. Gemeint ist damit, dass im Zuge der Digitalisierung und Vernetzung der Gesellschaft immer größere Datenmengen, in immer höherer Geschwindigkeit produziert werden. Diese Daten zeichnen sich durch eine große Vielfalt und Relationalität aus: Mehr und mehr Phänomene werden als Daten abgebildet und in einen Zusammenhang gebracht. Der Vortrag diskutiert anhand einiger Beispiele die Dilemmata, die sich daraus für die Regulierung von Big Data ergeben.

Das Innovationszentrum für Mobilität und gesellschaftlichen Wandel (InnoZ) stellt gemeinsam mit LSE Cities die Ergebnisse einer vergleichenden Studie zu Mobilitätseinstellungen und -verhalten in London und Berlin vor. Auf Basis aktueller Mobilitätstrends wurden in Berlin und London je ca. 1000 Personen repräsentativ befragt.

The 51st ITH Conference investigates the topic of “work and non-work” in an interdisciplinary perspective, in particular, from the point of view of the political construction of work and non-work. This approach is based on a broad notion of politics. The conference aims to con-tribute to denaturalising and re-politicising the concept and the practice of work and non-work and to highlight both work and non-work as a social relationship.

Proteste und andere widerständige Praxen sind weit verbreitet, die Forschung ist es nicht. Wer sich in der deutschsprachigen Sozialwissenschaft mit kollektiven Selbstorganisierungsprozessen in gesellschaftlichen Konflikten beschäftigt, arbeitet allzu häufig vereinzelt. Wir wollen das ändern, indem wir dauerhafte Arbeitszusammenhänge schaffen, in denen sich Kolleginnen und Kollegen mit ähnlichen Interessen austauschen und gemeinsame Aktivitäten entwickeln können.

The conference aims to discuss national identity at different levels, for example how individuals of immigrant and non-immigrant background negotiate and express national identity (e.g., in implicit and explicit attitudes or behaviors), how national identity is reproduced by public institutions such as schools, how states define national identity through their constitutions and laws or what measures and policies governments take to foster certain forms of national identity.

Álvaro Morcillo analyses the role played by US foundations in Latin American social sciences during the Cold War. The Rockefeller and Ford Foundations and the Social Science Research Council decisively contributed to make US ideas about social science extremely influential, if not outright predominant. In particular, the reception of Weber’s oeuvre in Spanish was shaped by them.

Bleiben die Geisteswissenschaften dieselben auch im digitalen Zeitalter?

Ja und Nein. Ja, weil die Aufgabenstellung der Geisteswissenschaften unverändert die ist, zur kulturellen Selbstverständigung und kritischen Reflexion auf gesellschaftliche Entwicklungen beizutragen.  Nein, weil sich ihre Gegenstände und mehr noch ihre Methoden ändern und mit Google ganz andere Konkurrenten im Feld der kulturellen Deutung dramatisch an Gewicht gewinnen.

MEET THE NEW INFLUENCE ELITES: A new breed of influence elite has emerged in recent years. Today’s novel elites are more mobile, diversified, and global in reach than their forebears, while often less visible. They set up or empower consulting firms, think tanks, nonprofits, and “grassroots organizations,” among other entities, that can serve as vehicles of influence.

How do political parties portray themselves and their agendas in national elections in Western Europe? Examining trends in campaign content from the late 1940s to the present, the paper investigates how changes in the electoral landscape have altered the types of issues emphasized by the major parties.

The university as an institution has prospered to an astonishing extent over the last hundred years, and especially over the last half century. It has grown in numbers and reach and scope, and it has spread worldwide. In his talk, David J. Frank will review the university’s sweeping expansion, focusing particularly on the institution's growing curriculum and its cultural domination in contemporary society.

Stress is highly prevalent and unequally distributed along socioeconomic and ethno-racial lines. While the effects of stress on children and adults are well documented, less is known about the long-term consequences of stress exposure when it occurs before birth. This project combines a natural experiment, an original longitudinal dataset, and in-depth interviews to examine the effect of in-utero exposure to acute stress on children’s outcomes.

Im Mittelpunkt des Symposiums stehen die Energiegenossenschaften und damit die Frage nach einer bürgernahen, dezentralen Energiewende. Wie sind die entstandenen Energiegenossenschaften strukturell und finanziell aufgestellt? Als wie robust werden sich die bestehenden Genossenschaften vor dem Hintergrund sich verändernder institutioneller Rahmenbedingungen erweisen und welche Rolle spielen Konzentration und Professionalisierung der Gremienstrukturen für die Anpassung der Unternehmensstrategien?

Writing a Stata command for methods that you use or develop disseminates your research to a huge audience.
This short course shows how to write a Stata estimation command. No Stata or programming experience is required, but it does help. After providing an introduction to basic Stata do-file programming, the course covers basic and advanced ado-file programming.

Jan-Werner Müller is Professor of Politics at the Department of Politics, Princeton University. His research interests include the history of modern political thought, liberalism and its critics, constitutionalism, religion and politics, and the normative dimensions of European integration.

Population-based pregnancy cohort studies are key to uncovering and explaining biological, psychological and social mechanisms that give rise to all aspects of health and development. While desirable, cohort studies are extremely expensive to set up and manage, and they are fraught with methodological difficulties. In this presentation, the setting up of a pregnancy cohort study will be discussed with reference to the Western Australian Pregnancy Cohort (Raine) Study and the Peel Child Health Study.

Changes in life courses, in modes of living, gender roles and family structures, and a globalized world – these are developments that influence the patterns of time. This conference will address the challenges for families in adapting to these changes. Speakers will be drawn from the three main groups within constituency of the ICCFR (International Commission on Couple and Family Relations): Policy, Therapy and Law. The ICCFR Community seeks new connections with students, academics and practitioners with expertise in the areas of its focus.

Neil Walker holds the Regius Chair of Public Law and the Law of Nature and Nations at the University of Edinburgh. His main area of expertise is constitutional theory. He has published extensively on the constitutional dimension of legal order at sub-state, state, supranational and international levels. He has also published at length on the relationship between security, legal order and political community.

Folke Schuppert ist emeritierter Professor des Rule of Law Centers, und Teilprojektleiter des Sonderforschungsbereichs (SFB) 700 "Governance in Räumen begrenzter Staatlichkeit" der FU Berlin.

According to ethnolinguistic identity theory, language and accent are important social markers. However, most studies in social psychology have used photographs of faces, names, or other labels of people omitting auditory information. In two lines of research we studied how combinations of accents and looks influence evaluations of such people.

The Manifesto Project Dataset is based on the content analysis of electoral programs from more than 900 parties in over 50 countries since 1945. The dataset is publicly available and one of the most influential datasets in research on political parties. The project Manifesto Research on Political Representation (MARPOR), situated at the WZB Berlin Social Science Center and funded by the German Research Foundation, is responsible for updating and enhancing this popular dataset.

The presentation seeks to contribute to the debate on economic crisis, policy change, and the resilience of neoliberalism by comparing the policy responses of a selected group of peripheral European countries (East and West), which have been hard hit by housing busts and financial crises. Looking at recent reforms targeting indebted house owners and the housing regime and/or the financial sector, she identifies three policy responses to the Great Recession.

Many authors suggest that when employed people have children, they are unable to reduce their work hours as much as they would prefer. Existing research, however, offers mixed support for that claim. Jeremy Reynolds will discuss the roots of this popular hypothesis and potential reasons for the mixed support, and offer an analysis of parenthood and work hour
mismatches using U.S. panel data.

Susan Rose-Ackerman is the Henry R. Luce Professor of Jurisprudence (Law and Political Science) with joint appointments between Yale Law School and the Yale Department of Political Science. She has taught and written widely on corruption, law and development, administrative law, law and regulatory policy, the nonprofit sector, and federalism.

J. Christopher McCrudden, a William W. Cook Global Law Professor at Michigan Law, is a professor of human rights and equality law at Queens University Belfast, and a practicing barrister-at-law with Blackstone Chambers. Specializing in human rights, he concentrates on issues of equality and discrimination as well as the relationship between international and comparative human rights law.

Can social policies be both effective at reducing social problems and inequalities, and politically popular? For a long time, scholars have thought that universal social policies were more effective and more popular than policies targeted at the disadvantaged. Scholars have also documented tremendous variation in the extent to which social policies are broadly supported by public opinion, constituencies of beneficiaries, and vested stakeholders.

The Internet offers a wealth of opportunities to learn about public opinion and behavior of political and other actors. Data from social networks, search engines or web services open avenues for new ways of measuring human behavior and preferences in previously unknown velocity and variety.

This paper addresses the issue of policy convergence in the area of integration policies from the angle of cultural path dependencies. It raises the question to what extent and how religion has been a factor in shaping integration policies in Western democracies, both with regard to the religious legacies of the host countries and the (predominantly Muslim) religion of immigrant groups. As a starting point, the paper addresses the observation of a growing complexity and

Christoph Möllers is Professor of Public Law and Jurisprudence at the Faculty of Law, Humboldt-University Berlin. He was a Fellow at NYU School of Law and at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin. He is a member of the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences. Since January 2011 he has acted as a judge at the Superior Administrative Court in Berlin.

Violence has become one of the most identifiable hallmarks of masculinity, a defining characteristics especially prominent among men in disadvantaged contexts. Physical alacrity offers them an opportunity to attain various types of capital. However, not all subscribe to this practice, even when it is woven into the fabric of street life that surrounds them. By drawing on 19 interviews with men involved in street-level sex work in a large American city, I examine their decision-making regarding willingness to engage in physical altercations.

in the Series Great Crisis of Capitalism - A Second Great Transformation?

Rethinking Comparative Political Economy: Growth Models and Distributive Dynamics

Lea Ypi is Associate Professor in Political Theory in the Government Department, London School of Economics, and Adjunct Associate Professor in Philosophy at the Research School of Social Sciences, Australian National University.

This workshop is an introduction to social network analysis emphasizing the subset of techniques often seen in macro-comparative social science. It will begin a brief discussion of social network analysis as applied to macro-comparative questions. We then introduce basic network notation, matrices and graphs. The major network analytic tools to be covered include centrality, singular value decomposition/correspondence analysis, and classic analyses of roles & positions.

Recently, the new approaches to the research on philanthropy have deepened our understanding of giving behavior. Those new developments include the ascent of field experiments and growth of lab experiments on fundraising where charities are perceived as active parties. Others include the influence of behavioral economics on our understanding of how social interactions affect donations. The ways people donate has recently changed as well. For example, the role of online activities like donation-based crowdfunding is increasing.

Die Politik zieht heute vielfach die Expertise von Wissenschaftlern zu Rate. Deren Deutungen und Risikoabwägungen können Grundlage politischer Entscheidungen sein, ersetzen können sie diese nicht. Am WZB wird SPD-Generalsekretärin Yasmin Fahimi über das besondere Verhältnis von Wissenschaft und Politik sprechen.

Nach der Rede wird der Dialog mit Schlaglichtern aus der Forschung des WZB eröffnet. Junge Wissenschaftlerinnen und Wissenschaftler stellen ihre Arbeiten vor, die aus unterschiedlichen Blickwinkeln das Thema Teilhabe und Integration beleuchten.

This discussion takes place within the colloquium series "Rethinking Law in a Global Context" that this summer semester focuses on "Law‘s Conception of Politics and Political Conceptions of Law".

Geld ist mehr als ein Kommunikationsmedium: die Institutionalisierung einer Geldordnung ist auch ein macht- und verteilungspolitisches Problem. Das zeigt sich aktuell: Das Geldregime der Europäischen Währungsunion transformiert horizontal-qualitative Unterschiede zwischen den politisch organisierten Gesellschaften Europas in eine hierarchische Über- und Unterordnung. Die nationalen Geldregime vor der Euro-Zeit trugen diesen Unterschieden Rechnung.

Wie bewerten wir in unserer Gesellschaft Qualität, die sich weder mit Meterstab noch in Geldsummen messen lässt? Wie beurteilen wir die Qualitäten von Wein oder die von Forschung oder die von Gülle? Wer entscheidet darüber, welcher Maßstab der gerade gültige ist? Mit ganz konkreten Situationen der Urteilsfindung setzen sich die Autoren des im Februar bei Oxford University Press erschienen Buches Moments of Valuation. Exploring Sites of Dissonance auseinander.

Co-authored with Jehane Simona Moussa and Christian Suter, Institut de Sociologie, Université de Neuchâtel

The health and social disadvantage faced by the Indigenous peoples of Australia (Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders) is an acknowledged part of Australian society. The contemporary data reveal striking inequalities between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians in most measurable aspects of wellbeing across the life cycle. The reasons for these disparities and the poor state of Aboriginal health in Australia are complex and multifaceted, although racism is increasingly being implicated as a key determinant of Aboriginal health.

Instrumental variables (IV) analysis is the leading strategy for dealing with endogenous treatments in observational causal inference: IV can recover causal effects where OLS fails. The price, as always, is untestable assumptions. This session reviews the logic of IV with a focus on the substantive interpretation of the assumptions.  We will develop visual intuition for different types of exclusion violations and understand why deviations from linearity greatly infringe upon the magic of IV.

Dr. Hagen Schulz-Forberg, visiting scholar from Aarhus University, Denmark, is co-organizing with Professor Mattias Kumm, managing head of the WZB Rule of Law Center, the author's workshop
"Zero Hours": Conceptual Insecurities and New Beginnings from Global Perspectives since the Interwar Period".

It takes place on Thursday, January 15 and Friday, January 16, 2015.

The workshops analyzes global historical perspectives on the intellectual, legal, political and economic ruptures in connection with the End of World War II.

The Australian Government’s policies towards irregular maritime arrivals (IMAs) since July 2013 have been controversial, uncompromising and consistently harsh, with asylum seekers isolated in detention centres for prolonged periods. Asylum seekers and refugees, especially youth, have distinct and unique stressors that make resettlement difficult.  

Die Berliner Stadtmitte ist ein „gewonnener Ort“. Er ist frei für Entwicklungen, die seinem Gewicht in der Vergangenheit entsprechen oder dieses übertreffen. Hier eröffnet sich die Chance, in die Zukunft hinein neuen Anforderungen gerecht zu werden.

Den Umgang mit der Berliner Mitte sowie deren Sinn und Aufgabe für die Gesamtstadt zu klären, ist eine Aufgabe, die Politik und Gesellschaft gemeinsam bewältigen müssen.