CESifo Network

To provide new insights on the effects of social insurance and transfer systems on economic behavior, CESifo, the ifo Institute, CES, and the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) will organize the Trans-Atlantic Public Economics Seminar (TAPES) on June 8–10, 2026 in Munich. 

At CESifo, Philipp-Leo Mengel will work on the financing dimension of Europe’s innovation gap, with a particular focus on venture capital, start-up scale-up, and barriers to cross-border capital allocation. Building on earlier editions of the IEP-CESifo Innovation Report, which diagnosed Europe’s “middle-technology trap,” the 2026 report examines why young innovative firms in Europe scale less successfully than their U.S. counterparts.

Philipp-Leo Mengel is a PhD candidate in Economics at Bocconi University, affiliated with the Institute for European Policymaking, and a contributor to the annual EU Innovation Report led by Daniel Gros and Clemens Fuest.

While at CESifo, Kristian Behrens will present and continue his work on a recent project that documents and tries to understand the drivers in the changes in the distribution of jobs in all major urban areas in the US between 1990 and 2020 (“The evolution of the residential-employment mix within U.S. cities”, joint with Julien Martin, Florian Mayneris, and Farid Toubal).

Kristian’s research mainly focuses on urban economics (spatial sorting, agglomeration economies), regional economics (spatial distribution of economic activity, changes in the spatial structure of cities and regions), international trade (impacts of trade integration, trade frictions, transport costs), and theoretical developments in monopolistic competition.

While at CESifo, Elizabeth Cascio hopes to advance two projects – the first concerning the intergenerational effects of immigrant legal status and the second exploring the causes and consequences of massive school infrastructure investments in the postwar United States. These projects build on her past research, which has looked to policy initiatives of the past – the spread of state subsidies for early education, the introduction of large-scale federal funding for K-12 education, the federal restoration of black voting rights – to shed light on the structural challenges to building the human capital stock of the future.

The CESifo Working Paper Series offers a wide range of economic research across diverse topics. Here are the papers that recently garnered the most attention, based on download figures.

Can artificial intelligence (AI) revive the long-declining productivity of European firms and boost the continent's economic growth? How well are EU economies positioned to leverage AI while mitigating risks such as job displacement and algorithmic collusion? The answers largely depend on the business ecosystem, the speed of adoption, and – ultimately – balanced regulation and policy: Upskilling workers, strengthening digital infrastructure, and deepening the EU single market are some of the priorities discussed in this Forum.