Das Ziel der RISIS Research Seminars ist es, den Austausch von Ideen innerhalb und außerhalb der RISIS-Community zu fördern. In jedem Seminar präsentieren und diskutieren Wissenschaftler:innen sowie Praktiker:innen ihre laufenden Forschungsarbeiten. Die Seminare unterstützen den wissenschaftlichen Austausch in einer kritischen Phase der Forschung zu einem gemeinsamen Thema.
Die Seminare sollen ein breites wissenschaftliches Publikum aus den Bereichen Policy, Hochschulforschung und Innovation einbeziehen. Zur inhaltlichen Vertiefung der Seminare wird zusätzlich eine Diskutant:in aus der wissenschaftlichen Community hinzugezogen.
Allgemeiner Ablauf der Seminare
Die Seminare bieten Raum für die Präsentation und Diskussion laufender quantitativer Forschungsarbeiten von Wissenschaftler:innen und Praktiker:innen zu relevanten Fragestellungen. Die Nutzung von RISIS-Datensätzen oder des European Higher Education Sector Observatory ist erwünscht, jedoch keine Voraussetzung. Die Online-Seminare werden in englischer Sprache abgehalten.
Als Vortragende:r teilnehmen
Wenn Sie Interesse daran haben, Ihre Arbeit im Rahmen der RISIS Research Seminars vorzustellen, wenden Sie sich bitte an Georg Zahradnik.
RISIS Seminar #58
Title: Firms’ disclosure of university ties on their website: An explorative analysis of its role for innovation performance
Date: 23 September 2026
Presenter: Bastian Krieger, ZEW, Leibniz Centre for European Economic Research
Discussant: Bernhard Dachs, AIT Austrian Institute of Technology
Abstract: This paper explores a novel web-based indicator to examine how firms' disclosure of university ties on their websites shapes their innovation performance. First, using data from the German Community Innovation Survey 2023 and the Tenders Electronic Daily database, combined with firms' disclosure of university ties on their website provided by ISTARI.AI, we investigate the indicator's properties by comparing the most frequently disclosed types of university ties: innovation collaborations, university customers, and employee education, with firms' survey responses and their procurement contracts. Second, we analyze how website disclosure of university ties relates to firms' revenues from new or significantly improved products or services, applying Ordinary Least Squares, a Control Function, and a Lewbel Instrumental Variable approach. In sum, the website disclosure of ties with universities is significantly associated with their related survey items and procurement contracts. Moreover, website disclosures show no consistent association with revenues from innovations new-to-the-firm. A consistent statistically significant relationship emerges only for small firms, where website disclosures are associated with higher revenues from market novelties. These findings suggest that our web-based indicator captures ties between firms and universities and that disclosing these ties on firms' websites may influence the market success of their novel products.
EHESO seminar
Title: Doctoral labour market returns in Switzerland
Date: 14 October 2026
Presenter: Kevin Schönholzer, Università della Svizzera Italiana (co-authored with Benedetto Lepori)
Discussant: tba
Abstract: Most doctoral graduates do not enter or stay in academic positions, despite a sustained policy concern about doctoral overproduction (Skakni et al., 2025; OECD, 2023). Existing evidence on the labour-market returns to the doctorate is dominated by pooled Master-versus-PhD wage comparisons and by STEM-heavy register studies. Neither approach can examine within-destination earnings differentials, and ISCO classifications further obscure the picture because they encode professional field rather than work content and contain no research-occupation code. Here we use the Swiss Graduate Survey (EHA) for four cohorts surveyed between 2017 and 2023 to estimate within-destination PhD-Master wage gaps across four labour-market segments. The regression-adjusted gap falls in a 17 to 20 percent band: Academic 18.0 percent, Industry-research 16.7 percent, Public-non-research 19.7 percent, Private services 19.1 percent. None of the PhD-by-destination interactions reaches conventional significance, and the 95 percent confidence intervals overlap, so the data do not reject equal within-destination gaps. The PhD median sits at the 68th, 67th, 86th, and 71st percentile of same-destination Masters. The within-destination band exceeds the pooled t+5 PhD premium of 14.5 percent because PhDs are over-represented in Academic, where the Master comparison group is depressed by Gymnasium teachers on part-time pensums. To compute these comparisons we construct a research-occupation indicator from EHA self-reports that shows convergent agreement across independent classifiers. The analysis is observational and the within-destination gap admits credentialist, productivity-selection, and non-cognitive-trait selection readings that the data cannot arbitrate.
RISIS Seminar #59
Title: Re-examining the Cost-Employability Link in Higher Education: A Simulation-Based Sensitivity Analysis
Date: 11 November 2026
Presenter: Rosario Scandurra, Universitat Pompeu Fabra - Barcelona School of Management
Discussant: Kevin Schönholzer, Università della Svizzera Italiana
Abstract: Despite widespread assumptions that higher university costs reflect better graduate outcomes, this study finds consistently weak correlations between university expenditures and employability metrics. Using a comprehensive Monte Carlo simulation and global sensitivity analysis, we assess whether various input parameters, including tuition fees, living expenses, housing costs, and different measures of employability, influence the correlation between overall university cost and QS employability ranking. However, heterogeneity analysis reveals that the relationship becomes stronger for Anglophone higher education systems, showing that in highly hierarchical stratified higher education system. The results reveal a correlation ranging between r=-0.03 and r=0.07. Heterogeneity analysis focusing on Anglophone universities report a strong relationship ranging between public funding and employability (r=-0.012) metrics European universities show that a higher share of public funding in university budgets does not immediately translate into better employability outcomes. This suggests that neither increased student expenditures nor greater public intervention guarantees superior graduate labour market performance. Sensitivity analyses, conducted through Random Forest feature importance, Sobol' variance decomposition, and Simulation Decomposition (SimDec), show that methodological choices in constructing employability metrics, including handling missing data, weighting components, and selecting or excluding indicators, are the primary drivers of almost 70% of the variability in the observed correlation. In contrast, tuition fees, living expenses, housing costs, and public funding levels have minimal impact. The findings challenge common widespread assumptions that resource-intensive education directly translates into better labour market outcomes. The results highlight critical measurement validity issues in university rankings and suggest that higher education employability metrics depend more on methodological choices than substantive differences in educational investment. Current employability metrics may mislead prospective student choice and private and public investment in higher education: a standardization of measurement approaches is strongly needed.
RISIS Seminar #60
Title: Territorial Drivers of Social Innovation
Date: 9 December 2026
Presenter: Filippo Berti Mecocci, University of Parma (co-authored with Amir Maghssudipour, and Roberto Dellisanti)
Discussant: tba
Abstract: What territorial conditions enable social innovation? This paper examines whether accumulated technological knowledge, density externalities and public funding help explain social innovation intensity across European regions. Relying on a regional dataset originally assembled from multiple sources and adopting different econometric specifications, findings suggest no significant role for accumulated technological knowledge, while population density is positively associated with social innovation intensity. Public funding also matters, but only in low-density areas.
RISIS Seminar #61
Title: The university versus region effect: A variance decomposition of academic spin-off performance
Date: 20 January 2027
Presenter: Julia Mokhtar, Ghent University
Discussant: Massimiliano Guerini, Politecnico di Milano
Abstract: Academic spin-offs (ASOs) bring innovations from the university to the market, thereby potentially generating economic value. Prior research has studied ASO performance in relation to either specific university-level or regional-level characteristics. However, because universities are embedded in regional ecosystems, studying either level in isolation creates an attribution problem. This leaves the relative importance of these two levels ambiguous. To address this, we apply multi-level modeling to a dataset of 3,164 ASOs (2010–2019) from 212 universities across 99 European regions. Results show that the regional effect accounts for 27% of the variance in return on assets and 16% in sales, whereas the university effect is negligible.
RISIS Seminar #62
Title: Resilient Hierarchies: How Brexit and COVID-19 Reshaped European Student Mobility Networks
Date: 10 February 2027
Presenter: Ivan Lichner, Institute of Economic Research, Slovak Academy of Sciences
Discussant: tba
Abstract: The period from 2013 to 2023 was marked by major geopolitical and public-health shocks that reshaped the institutional environment for international student mobility in Europe, most notably Brexit and the COVID-19 pandemic. Against this backdrop, the evolution of intra-European student degree mobility is examined across 2013–2019 and 2020–2023 periods using a combination of network analysis and Poisson Pseudo Maximum Likelihood (PPML) gravity models in a unified framework. The analysis maps the hubs, corridors, and hierarchies of non-PhD and PhD flows across 31 European countries and identifies their economic, institutional, cultural, and geographical determinants, interpreted through four complementary theoretical lenses: world-systems, human capital, acculturation, and aspiration theories. The results reveal a persistent core–periphery structure, with the UK, Germany, and France emerging as dominant destinations. PhD mobility is substantially more concentrated and more strongly associated with academic prestige than non-PhD mobility. Economic disparities, educational quality, cultural and linguistic proximity, and diaspora ties are consistently associated with stronger bilateral student flows. Despite the major shocks separating the two periods, the overall topology of the European mobility network remained remarkably stable, suggesting that these shocks were absorbed primarily through a reallocation of bilateral flows rather than a fundamental restructuring of the network. At the same time, a UK-specific event study identifies substantial declines in inbound mobility associated with distinct Brexit-related milestones: the 2016 referendum for PhD flows and the 2021 changes in EU/EEA fee status for non-PhD flows. The findings therefore demonstrate that aggregate network stability can coexist with substantial country-level adjustment, highlighting the resilience of the broader European mobility structure alongside substantial country-level adjustments.
