The Centre for Social Sciences POLECON

Vera Šćepanović is a Lecturer in International Relations and European Studies at Leiden University. She was previously a post-doctoral Max Weber Fellow at European University Institute in Florence and a visiting lecturer at the Central European University in Budapest. She obtained her PhD in Political Economy from Central European University. Her research focuses on the institutional implications of dependent development, and the role of the European Union as a development agent, both in its member states and in third countries. She also has a long-standing interest in the politics of work, including transformation of work relations under the impact of globalization and the effect of digitalization on our understanding and regulation of work. She is a member of the editorial board of Transfer: European Review of Labour and Reseach. Her works have been published in Review of International Political Economy, European Journal of Industrial Relations, Europe-Asia Studies and Regional Studies.

Jasper Paul Simons is a doctoral researcher at the European University Institute in Florence, Italy. His research project is concerned with post-crisis economic policy trajectories in the Visegráds. Focusing on economic development and welfare, he attempts to explain divergent institutional paths by tracing the policy-formation processes in each of the Visegráds. His largely qualitative analysis draws on descriptive statistics, primary documents and a large number of interviews with government executives, public institutional actors, organised interest representatives and policy experts. Beyond his doctoral project, he is interested in international political economy, the European Union’s governance system, and economic history. He previously studied these topics in his (under)graduate education at the University of Amsterdam, Leiden University and McGill University.

Florian Weiler started his new position as Assistant Professor for Political Economy at the University of Groningen in January 2020. He holds an MA in Political Science from the University of Innsbruck, and an MA in Economics from Johns Hopkins University. After a short stay at the World Bank working on governance and anti-corruption at the end of his studies in the US, Florian started a PhD at ETH Zurich on the global political economy of climate change. Since finishing his dissertation, he held academic positions at the University of Bamberg (Post-doc), the University of Kent (Lecturer), and the University of Basel (Senior Researcher). His recent academic work focuses on environmental issues on the one hand, and on stakeholder strategies to influence policy processes on the other.

Ádám Kerényi is a Junior Research Fellow at the Institute of World Economics of the Centre for Economic and Regional Studies. He is a member of the Research Group on European Integration. His research interests include financial stability, political economy and public policy, and he studies the effects of digital transformation on legislation at the EU level and in the member states. He is a member of the World Interdisciplinary Network for Institutional Research (WINIR), the European Association for Evolutionary Political Economy (EAEPE) and the Institute for New Economic Thinking’s Young Scholars Initiative (INET YSI). He is an external lecturer at the University of Szeged and Corvinus University of Budapest, where he also serves as research assistant to Professor János Kornai. He has published articles in Acta Oeconomica, Financial and Economic Review, Economy and Finance and Public Finance Quarterly.