For the second Bonn-Frankfurt-Mannheim PhD Conference, PhD students in economics and finance from Bonn, Frankfurt and Mannheim met at the University of Bonn on 23 and 24 May 2024. As in the previous year, the conference was organized by students from the graduate schools of the participating universities to provide young researchers with a platform for exchanging their research ideas.
In seven sessions on various topics, more than 50 PhD students presented their research. In addition, coffee breaks, joint lunches, and a large evening event offered a variety of opportunities for direct exchange among PhD students from Germany's top economics faculties.
A particular highlight of the program was the keynote speech by Isabel Schnabel, Member of the Executive Board of the European Central Bank, who presented the current possibilities of monetary policy to influence the price level and the real economy in her speech. She also pointed out possible future challenges for the ECB. Developments such as the structural change towards a service economy and the increasingly evident effects of climate change could have a lasting impact on the effectiveness of monetary policy.
At the end of the conference, Luca Braghieri from Bocconi University presented his current research in a second keynote speech. He and his co-author show that the thematic treatment of the German Democratic Republic in history lessons at school in a German federal state reduced the tendencies towards extreme left-wing ideologies. Due to the topicality of this subject, the keynote also concluded with a lively discussion.
The Organizing Committee thanks the Leibniz Institute for Financial Research SAFE, Goethe University Frankfurt, the Graduate School of Economics, Finance and Management (GSEFM), ECONtribute, Frankfurt School of Finance and Management, and the Graduate School of Economic and Social Sciences (GESS) at the University of Mannheim for their support of the two-days conference.
