The Employment and Social Protection Area of the CESifo research network, organised by Kai Konrad, Munich, deals with social and redistributive policies of the state, in particular their normative and positive causes and their consequences for employment and wages. It explores the theoretical and empirical links between institutional characteristics of the labour market (e.g. bargaining structures, labour unions, redistributive tax systems, employment protection legislation, welfare, etc.) and economic performance, from both a national and an international perspective. Members of this area also study how alternative macroeconomic policy regimes affect the permanence and volatility of unemployment, and the extent of wage rigidity. The assistant to this area is Volker Meier.
Kai Konrad (b. 1961) got his university degrees at the University of Heidelberg (Diplom-Volkswirt; eq. M.A. in Economics, 1985) and the University of Munich (Dr.oec.publ.; eq. Ph.D. in Economics, 1990, and Dr.rer.pol.habil., 1993). He had research and teaching positions at the Universities of Munich, Bonn, Bergen (Norway) and the University of California at Irvine. He held a chaired Professorship of Economics at the Free University of Berlin from 1994 to 2009 and was a Director at the Social Science Research Center Berlin (WZB) from 2001-2009. Currently he is Director at the Max Planck Institute for Intellectual Property, Competition and Tax Law.
Since 2007 he is a Co-editor of the Journal of Public Economics. He was a Managing Editor of Economic Policy and a co-founding Editor of Economics of Governance. He is on the editorial boards of several other international journals in Economics and Political Science. He served as an advisor to governments and is the Vice Chairman of the Council of Scientific Advisors to the German Ministry of Finance.
His main fields of current and future research interests are in public economics, microeconomic theory and political economy. He published more than 80 papers in Economics, Political Sciences, Law, and Management in international journals in such as the Economic Journal, American Economic Review, Games and Economic Behavior, Journal of Public Economics, Journal of International Economics, Journal of Conflict Resolution, Journal of Theoretical Politics, and Management Science.
Area Conference on Employment and Social Protection
