Research at Webster Vienna

We are proud to announce that our Business and Management Associate Professor, Dr. Menbere Workie, presented a paper at the World Finance Conference 2021, Oslo, Norway (held online) that took place in August 2021. World Finance Conference brings the best researchers around the world together to discuss their findings. This conference is one of the most important conferences in finance in the world! The title of the paper is “Do Remittances Trigger the Dutch Disease in the Long Run? A Panel Cointegration Model.”

Abstract: In this paper we investigate the impact of financial inflows in the form of personal remittances on the real exchange rate using a sample of 134 developing and emerging economies (EMDEs) over the years 1980-2019. Using the heterogeneous panel cointegration approach, we find that remittances exert a long-term pressure on the real appreciation of the domestic currency, which is beyond the level of real appreciation implied by the Balassa-Samuelson effect. Consequently, we find evidence that remittances might contribute to triggering the phenomenon of the Dutch disease. We also find evidence for heterogeneity in the effects of remittances on the real exchange rate over the long-term: having floating exchange rate, higher level of economic freedom and higher financial development reduces the long-run appreciation of the real exchange rate due to the remittance inflows and thus, the risk of the Dutch disease arising from the remittances inflows.

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Faculty — Business and Management

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Dr. Franco Algieri, Associate Professor and Department Head of International Relations at WVPU, has become part of The Alphen Group (TAG), an informal network of leading strategic thinkers who have come together to consider the future of the transatlantic relationship and European security and defense and do something about it. 

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Professor Bátora publishes article on interstitial organizations and prospects of the liberal international order

In his new article in a special issue of International Affairs, professor Bátora proposes a complementary approach to analyzing destabilization of the liberal international order (LIO) and argues that such challenges are related to endogenous institutional processes within the LIO. Faced with constraints of the core norms, rules and institutions of the LIO, states use interstitial organizations (INTOs)—new organizational forms recombining resources, rules, practices and structures from multiple institutional domains—allowing for innovative ways of delivering foreign policies.

Using organization theory and new institutionalist approaches, the article outlines a three-dimensional analytical framework to the study of emergence of interstitial organizational forms and interstitial institutional change of international institutions. It applies this framework to the study of two types of INTOs—the European External Action Service (EEAS) and private military companies (PMCs)—both of which are shown to have transformational impacts on two core primary institutions of the modern state order, namely diplomacy and war. The article argues that reliance on INTOs can both enhance and constrain states' ability to promote the core principles of the LIO and concludes with a discussion of two possible paths of adaptation of this order.

In a new article, professor Bátora conceptualizes the EU’s defense integration

In a new article in a special issue of European Foreign Affairs Review, professor Bátora analyzes the dynamics of differentiated integration in EU defense. The main argument is that Permanent Structured Cooperation (PESCO) is bringing about two different and mutually complementary dynamics of integration: organizational field formation and segmentation.

The preliminary practical result is a dual dynamic of growing standardization of the EU’s defense industries across all twenty-five PESCO Member States in defense project development and continued reliance on Western European defense industrial actors (including the UK after Brexit) in defense R&D and production.

This means that while PESCO provides space for new joint defense projects across the participating Member States, the established structure and capacities of defence industries in the EU today set up conditions for what may be termed structural leadership by Western European defense industrial actors. Overall, this means that there is a particular – segmented – kind of differentiated integration in the field of EU defence industries in today’s EU.

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Faculty — International Relations

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Sustainability and Communication

Together with Diana Igropoulou, one of his former students at Webster Vienna, Dr. Anthony Löwstedt has published a chapter in a definitive volume on the relationship between international communication and sustainable development. Selected chapters from the volume will serve as texts for an upcoming course in international communications (MDST 3260) to be taught by Dr. Löwstedt at Webster Vienna.

The authors of the chapter argue that media regulation systems must refocus their justifications and legitimacy on more than human rights, which – along with nation-state, governmental, and corporate rights – have so far dominated media regulation on national as well as transnational levels. Löwstedt and Igropoulou recommend more globalization of media regulation and more regulative focus on sustainability by means of normative biodiversity and cultural diversity.

Cultural diversity includes diversity of media ownership and control, of sponsorship, employment, content, perspective, and opinion. But the regulative framework, international law in its present form, is also not enough. The sovereignty and the egoism of nation-states and business corporations and related, jealously protected secrecies, are among the main problems. Freedoms of information and expression, regulation of hate speech and incitement to violence, protection of privacy and other human rights are all necessary aspects of transnational media regulation, say the authors, but so is a new governance structure able to respond effectively to climate change and unsustainable developments on a global level.

Löwstedt, A. & Igropoulou, D. (2021). Between Rights and Diversities: Can the Regulation of Communication Help Prevent Climate Change and Promote Sustainable Development? Chapter 6 in J. Servaes & M. J. Yusha’u (eds.) Palgrave Handbook of International Communication and Sustainable Development. London: Palgrave-MacMillan, pp. 127-147.

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Faculty — Strategic Communication

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This or that brain area? The neural correlates of beauty

In these days, in the course PSYC2000/50 "Issues in Contemporary Psychology : Neuroesthetics”, Prof Dr Luca Ticini (who recently join Vienna Webster Private University) is discussing with the students the role of two main areas that seem equally involved in the experience of beauty: the middle orbitofrontal cortex (mOFC) and the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (dLPFC).

He highlights that it may seems pointless to discuss the role of one or the other brain structure in such a complex domain of study as Neuroaesthetics, particularly because at the present time we are looking at the brain areas as network rather than in isolation. Nonetheless, the neuroimaging literature in the field of aesthetics seems to be divided in two “schools”: one consistently producing results highlighting OFC’s role and the other the importance of the prefrontal cortex.

For this reason, Prof. Ticini decided to discuss in class the role that these two brain structures have in aesthetics as well as in other cognitive domains. Who is the winner? The result of his research argues that the aesthetic experience results from the activity of the mOFC. His work in this domain is open access (you can download the article by clicking on the link below), therefore we  leave it to you to consider whether the conclusions he reached are sound and reasonable.

More information available here.

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Faculty — Psychology

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