As nations in the developed world strive to reduce carbon dioxide emissions to counteract the effects of climate change, transitioning from more carbon intensive cities to greener modes of housing and transportation will become paramount challenges for governments throughout the 21st century. The United States, who produces about 11 percent of CO2 while accounting for just two percent of the world’s population, presents a particular challenge. Infrastructure costs in the United States are astronomically higher than in comparable developed nations in Europe or Asia. Further, housing construction—especially dense urban housing and its accompanying low carbon profile—is nearly impossible to build in almost all major American metro areas due to restrictive land use policies, an abundance of veto points exploited by engage local interest groups and America’s strong federalist institutions that give deference to local governments when deciding land use policy. This project seeks to understand how interest groups in the United States capture local housing and land use policymaking and why a similar phenomenon hasn’t evolved in many European Union nations. Studying local interest groups in a comparative setting will better illuminate how weaknesses in political institutions engender this behavior and lead to differing outcomes between the two regions. Identifying these institutional deficiencies will also aid reforms in the United States crucial for modernizing that democracy and aiding the global fight against climate change. This project will also deepen understanding of how interest groups form and evolve, what motivates the transition from individual financial motivation to the formation of an interest group and how these groups capture local political institutions.

M-HEAL seeks to investigate the impact of modern workplace dynamics—specifically, market competition, automation, and organizational restructuring—on employees' mental health. The objectives of this study are threefold: (1) to identify the key factors influencing employees' mental health within the context of these workplace changes, (2) to quantify the extent to which these factors impact mental health, and (3) to explore how these effects vary across different individual, firm, and industry characteristics. The study will utilize an interdisciplinary approach to achieve these objectives, integrating insights from industrial organizations, labor economics, and health economics. The research will be conducted in Denmark, leveraging its comprehensive and longitudinal register data, which provides a unique opportunity to analyze these dynamics over a 20-year period. The methodology is structured into three work packages: a literature review and meta-analysis to establish a conceptual framework, a causal analysis using advanced microeconometric methods to identify the effects of workplace dynamics on mental health, and a heterogeneity analysis to assess how these effects differ across various demographic and firm characteristics. The relevance of this research to the work program lies in its potential to address the increasing societal challenge of workplace-related mental health issues, which are becoming more prevalent as economic and technological changes accelerate. By providing a deeper understanding of the causal relationships between workplace dynamics and mental health, this study aims to inform the development of targeted policies and interventions that can reduce the burden of work-related stress and improve overall mental health outcomes. The findings are expected to have significant implications for both academic research and practical policy-making, contributing to the broader goals of promoting health and well-being in the workplace across Europe.

This proposal proposal intends to systematically pioneer the cross-cultural mobile user experience issues and provide valuable guidelines for designing cultural adaptability into the context-awareness of smart phones. The objectives of this proposal are to: 1) Identify the user experience problems that exists in mobile context-awareness system in Europe and China, and uncover the key factors producing the problems; 2) Examine the influence of context-awareness factors and culture difference on mobile context-aware cross-cultural applications (MOCCA); 3) Apply the findings to improving the design of mobile context-awareness systems and demonstrate specific user experiences for European and Chinese users of smart phones with cultural adaptability. In WP 1, 2 and 3, we will use a combination of qualitative methods (contextual inquiry) and quantitative methods (experiment and psychophysiological measures) to support our objective of identifying and measuring cross-cultural user experiences of the smart phone and the applications. In WP 4 we will apply a user-centered design method to ensure that our cross-cultural UX measures and design guidelines for context-awareness features in smart phones are in fact usable. The experienced researcher will improve and explore alternative approaches to measuring user experience, under supervision provided by the host university, and in close collaboration with the university providing the secondment, Chinese universities, and a European (Danish) high tech company. The research will be published in leading journals in the field of Human-Computer Interaction and disseminated in Europe and China. The host university provides intellectual and physical infrastructure specifically aimed to bring the experienced researcher to the next level of a professor position in the field of business-oriented Human-Computer Interaction, with a focus on extending and bridging user experience research between Europe and China.

In this project I explore the effect of diversity-related societal events on workplace cooperation. Throughout the recent decade a number of large-scale cultural and political events have continued to draw attention to threats like racism, sexism, and discrimination. Prominent examples of such events are the #MeToo movement, the Black Lives Matter movement, or Islamic terrorism in Europe. Despite the prominence of these events in public discourse, we don’t know the consequences of this mega-threats for the cooperation and interaction between co-workers in organizations. In this project, I deploy a novel interdisciplinary approach, in which I combine insights from the emerging “macro” literature in sociology and management and their effect on organizations and the large existing “micro” literature in psychology on diverse work teams and behavioral strategy in order to develop and test novel hypotheses about how diversity related large-scale events that occur in organizations´ larger social context affect the cooperation in diverse teams and the decision-making in organizations. I will focus on four related research questions: 1) How did the #BlackLivesMatter movement affect the cooperation between black and white co-workers? 2) How did the #MeToo movement affect the cooperation between male and female co-workers? 3) How did Islamist terrorist attacks in Europe affect the cooperation between Islamic and Non-Islamic co-workers? and 4)How can managers and business leaders manage issues arising from mega-threats? In order to test my prediction I will collect a novel large scale database including information on diversity related mega-threats from Twitter and media reports and combine it with data on the cooperation in organizations. The ambitious goal of this interdisciplinary project is to open a research stream which strives to develop an understanding on how macro societal events affect our micro behavior with other co-workers in organzations.

Households are exposed to a wide array of monetary and non-monetary risks: employment risk, financial risk, interest rate risk, and health and mortality risk, to name a few. Society and policymakers can certainly help households manage risk, but to be effective, they need to understand the ways households cope with risk and how vulnerable they are to market and policy changes. For instance, how do households react to bank defaults and market failures? How personal do these experiences have to be for households to change behavior? And how permanent are the changes in behavior? The goal of the proposed research program is to understand how personal and market experiences affect financial decisions made by households, such as savings behavior, portfolio allocation, borrowing decisions, mortgage choices, and pension savings. RDRECON combines theory and evidence with an empirical research strategy that is comprised of both natural and field experiments. The theoretical component models how households make decisions. The empirical component uses both econometric and experimental methodologies to study actual household behavior across a range of economic and financial margins, as well as the influence of personal and market experiences on a household’s financial choices. RDRECON’s strength and path-breaking innovation is its combination of administrative register data and controlled field experiments to form treatment and control groups of interest which allow empirical identification of theoretical predictions. This approach puts theory to work and overcomes the limits of identification in natural experiments. To this end, RDRECON will further our understanding of how households respond to personal and market experiences, and provide helpful insights for policy makers.