FIT is involved in strengthening public economics education in Africa. A new public economics curriculum provides African universities with locally grounded teaching materials and open-access resources. The initiative by VATT, HAUS, TaxDev, UNU-WIDER in collaboration with the University of Nairobi and eight other African universities will deliver a full set of materials designed to make public economics teaching more relevant to African policy and research contexts.
Almost 70 economists from across Europe gathered in Helsinki on 21–22 August 2025 for the third Workshop in Labor Economics: Wages, Employment and Inequality (WEI 2025). The two-day event featured keynote lectures by Stephen Machin (LSE) and Magne Mogstad (University of Chicago), alongside a rich programme of sessions and flash talks presenting recent research. Discussions focused on wages, employment, and inequality, with lively exchanges between senior and early-career researchers underscoring the workshop’s reputation as one of the high-quality forums in labor economics in Europe.
Kimmo Palanne defends his dissertation, Essays on Transportation and the Environment, at Aalto University on March 21, 2025. The research indicates that lowering public transport fares in the Helsinki metropolitan area reduced car use and CO2 emissions. However, the measure was expensive in terms of cost per tonne of CO2 reduced compared to other climate actions.
Only a small fraction of retail trade companies opted to pay newly hired workers under the age of 25 subminimum wages, after policy change. This finding suggests that prevailing wage norms significantly influence firms’ wage setting.
