MORSE Theme Subcategories – current/past Research

Resilience to Climate Change (Prof. Mark Sanders)

Mark Sanders addresses the importance of resilience to natural hazards and extreme weather conditions, as well as entrepreneurship and resilience. Resilience can influence natural hazards by considering local impacts and involving institutions. Financial and industrial structures can promote resilience to extreme weather conditions. Finally, adaptation and recovery can infuse more resilience into entrepreneurship.

Resilience in open economics (Tania Treibich)

Tania Treibich is currently conducting research with her team consisting of Naditha Mathew (UNU-MERIT) and Karsten Mau (MILE) on the topic of "Resilience in the Open Economy". The main question of this research is whether trade benefits all, as the models teach us? In this context, Tania Treiblich emphasises the importance of external shocks such as the global financial crisis and/or the collapse of trade and the propagation along value chains through business-trade relations. This theme addresses several questions:

Who is hit by these shocks? How do they propagate through trade and value networks? Who is better able to cope with the shocks and why? The possible answers can be identified through resilience, with the "Impact of COVID-19 at the country and firm level" being one of the current research papers.

Does trade have an impact on corporate sustainability performance? Tania Treibich mentions that trading companies in developing countries could either be cleaner - more efficient or incorporating environmental standards in trade - or outsource fewer polluting tasks abroad. "The environmental performance of Indian exporting companies" is part of the current paper.

Finally, the questions that arise in terms of policy changes: How to maintain healthy buffers and circuit breakers that are very valuable in times of crisis but do not constrain the economy in normal times? How to reduce CO2 emissions along global value chains?

Migration and resilience in Labour Markets (Frank Cörvers)

Sustainable job opportunities are unlikely to be equally accessible or of equal quality for workers with different skill levels, including certain groups such as migrants, disabled people, older people, entrepreneurs, and atypical workers. There is a need to clarify how to support these groups in developing and using their talents, how to integrate them into society and how to equip them for the challenges of the future labour market.

The main questions that arise are: (1) What challenges do the different groups face in crossing the border? (2) How can the obstacles be removed? (Selection of migrants who match labour market needs; intra-EU vs. TCN; temporary vs. permanent immigration, support for different groups, such as entrepreneurs, older people, etc.) (3) What policy instruments can facilitate sustainable labour market opportunities for different groups? (4) Strategies for education and training?

Previous research included the "Joint project UNU-MERIT & ROA: Labour Migration and Shortages of Inter-mediary skilled (WODC)" and the "Evaluation of refugee entrepreneurship support". Currently there is PhD research on cross-border barriers (on diploma recognition and labour market resilience) and refugee entrepreneurship (Elinor Ostrom Grant). Future research should focus on resilience in the Euroregion (cross-border mobility) and post-doctoral research: Job polarisation, social protection, and voter preferences.

Resilience, Responsible, and Sustainable Initiatives Observatory (Dr. Sedar Turkeli and DAD, MSI, MILE, OSE)

The MORSE Observatory focuses on the resilience of society in relation to urgent local and complex global pressures. This includes cross-departmental research (e.g. interdisciplinary approaches) and cross-cutting interactions with external actors (e.g. transdisciplinary approaches). This research and implementation line aims to highlight the state of play (e.g. capabilities already in place but not yet adapted) and propose future partnerships (e.g. within/between departments, with external public, private and social partners) for further research and practice collaboration. The researchers also continue to collect applications from external partners (resilience, sustainable, responsible initiatives) for the MORSE Observatory.

Sedar Turkeli expects the following issues and actions to be addressed soon: The research team will be more involved in a MaRBLe project (UCM) and an Honours+ project (EDLAB). An open observatory for researchers, entrepreneurs and policy makers will also be established.

Other recent MORSE topics on resilience: inclusion (by Nilesen), open economies (by Treibich), policy (by Versluis), observatory (by Türkeli), finance (by Bos).

Resilience to uncertainty (Giulia Piccillo)

Giulia Piccillo studies the effect of uncertainty on individual behavior and societal outcomes. This agenda is structured in three streams, which use different methods:

1. The cognitive psychology and behavioral economics stream focusses on the individual dealing with uncertain situations. She uses survey and experimental data and models it through individual learning mechanisms.
2. The macro, modelling stream includes deviations from rational expectations into macroeconomic (especially monetary policy) models. These deviations include agent disagreement and bounded rationality arising from learning dynamics when dealing with uncertainty.
3. The data analytics stream studies the relevance of waves in beliefs that are relevant from social media platforms, including the arise of systemically false beliefs and their viral and persistent sharing. In this context, fake news and conspiracies represent the anti-rational expectations, since they are clearly false beliefs that keep being widespread in the big picture.