About
I lead the Science of Cities program at the Complexity Science Hub Vienna. Below are some of my current projects and upcoming talks and seminars.Â
Upcoming seminars and talks
Feb 21: Seminar at Northwestern Institute on Complex Systems. On the right track? Extracting climate change mitigation pathways from patent data.
Feb 23: Seminar at University of Toronto's Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy: Inventing Modern Invention: The Professionalization of Technological Progress in the US
Feb 27: Seminar at Berkeley Haas School of Business: Inventing Modern Invention: The Professionalization of Technological Progress in the US
Connecting opportunity: Leveraging Ukraine's diaspora to unlock new value chain investments
With Ljubica Nedelkoska, we have now started a collaboration between the Complexity Science Hub Vienna, the Growth Lab at Harvard University and the Central European University. The project aims to analyze how the transformative potential of Ukrainian diaspora can be unlocked, by connecting them to companies in Austria and Germany in ways that facilitate future value chain investments in Ukraine. This work builds on earlier analysis (here and here) of the Ukrainian economy on the urgent need to reorient Ukraine's global value chain towards Europe.
Studying the past and future of work
There are many uncertainties around what the future of work will look like. Will workers be able to cope with the changes that new technologies in AI bring to the workplace? Which cities are best positioned to embrace the coming changes? How will we organize teamwork? To answer these questions, we have been creating datasets that span across sufficiently long time periods to see how well we have managed to cope with past changes in the nature of work. Here are some recent papers and working papers by myself and my team and colleagues on understanding the nature of work:
How the content of occupations has changed (1940-2020): Nedelkoska, L., Matha, S.G., McNerney, J., Assumpcao, A., Diodato, D. and Neffke, F., 2021. Eight Decades of Changes in Occupational Tasks, Computerization and the Gender Pay Gap. (Druid best paper award 2023)
Measuring skill mismatch from detailed skills and tasks data: Neffke, F., Nedelkoska, L. and Wiederhold, S., 2024. Skill mismatch and the costs of job displacement. Research Policy, 53(2), p.104933. Download
Teams - Who you work with matters: Neffke, F.M.H., 2019. The value of complementary co-workers. Science advances, 5(12), p.eaax3370.