University of Wisconsin Press Blog

Butternuts and Maple Sugar Candy

In the Midwest, unmistakably crisp mornings and golden leaves herald the arrival of a new season. Today we share a charming excerpt about the autumnal butternut harvest from Farm Girl by Beuna Coburn Carlson.

Butternut trees grew in several areas in the woodlot and pasture on our farm. We watched the nuts develop during summer and waited for them to ripen in fall. While they were still green, they were soft enough to cut with a knife; when ripe, a hammer or a special nutcracker was necessary to crack the hard shell and extract the meat. Dad used his jackknife to slice through a green nut to show us the complex structure of the nut, and allowed us to taste the bitter, unripe nutmeat. How different they would be after the nuts had ripened and dried, their rich, creamy, buttery taste a perfect flavor in maple sugar candy!

Our farm in west central Wisconsin was at the western and northern limits of the range of the butternut tree. Sometimes called white walnut, it produces nuts that are extremely hard shelled, much like black walnuts. Butternut trees grow to sixty feet in height, rarely higher. The wood was prized for carving and, before metal items were readily available, for maple sap spiles. Dad was skillful also in making wonderful wooden whistles for the kids in spring before the new growth in the tree hardened.

We knew which of the trees produced the most and the best nuts. One special tree on a sunny knoll in the pasture bore a great crop. Whereas butternuts generally are oval in shape, the nuts from this tree were nearly round, more like walnuts. It was easy to fill a bucket with these gems! Another tree, growing in the woodlot near the edge of the pasture, produced long, oval nuts, huge and choice. It was important to gather them as quickly as possible before the butternut poachers found them. The tree was near the road, with only a two-strand barbed-wire fence between the woodlot and road. People from as far away as St. Paul and Minneapolis combed the countryside and took butternuts wherever they found them.

Black and white photo of a farm with trees in the background showing four children: Neva sitting on the left with short curled hair and a gingham dress, nest to her Beuna sits with short parted hair and a checkered dress with a bow on the neckline, Burr is seated wearing a shirt and trousers, and Add is seated on the right wearing overalls. — Coburn kids. L to R: Neva, Beuna, Burr, Add.

Gathering the nuts on a sunny day in fall after the butternut shells had hardened and the outer husks had dried involved the whole family. Little kids could pick up nuts from the ground where they had fallen while Mother and Dad harvested the ones still on the tree. They carried buckets filled with nuts to the granary and spread them on the floor to finish drying.

On cold, dark winter days when no outdoor work was possible, Dad often got a pail of butternuts, now dried and ready to use, from the granary. He took them to a warm spot in the cellar near the furnace, sat down with a hammer in hand, placed a butternut upright on a special piece of wood, and cracked it. If he hit it just right, it would split into two pieces and the nutmeat would come out easily. That was a rarity. Most often it required several blows of the hammer to shatter the shell and expose the meat. When Dad had cracked a goodly amount, he brought them upstairs to the kitchen, where anyone willing to do so attacked them with a nutpick.

Very rarely, a perfectly cracked nut would yield a perfect nutmeat—two halves shaped like fat pantaloons. Finding a “pair of pants” among the butternuts was comparable to finding a four-leaf clover in the grass and gave the finder special bragging rights.

Helping pick out the pieces of meat from the shells with a nutpick entitled one to snack on them too, but wise children waited until Mother made a batch of maple sugar candy. She made it by boiling a saucepan of maple syrup, beating in cream, adding a handful of butternut meats, and pouring the thick, smooth mass into a buttered pan. When Mother decided it was cool enough, she cut it into squares and we tasted the wonderful candy. I believe we could taste in every bite the sap from the trees gathered on a frosty spring morning, the steaming syrup from the big, black kettle, the sunny afternoon of gathering the nuts, and the triumph of getting pieces of nuts from the rough shells. We knew where it came from and what effort it took to produce it. It was our candy and we loved it.

Beuna Coburn Carlson is a writer based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.

From Farm Girl by Beuna Carlson Coburn. © 2020 by the Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System. All rights reserved.

University of Wisconsin Press Welcomes New Journal for 2021: History of Pharmacy and Pharmaceuticals

The University of Wisconsin Press is pleased to announce a new partnership with the American Institute of the History of Pharmacy (AIHP). The institute’s journal, History of Pharmacy and Pharmaceuticals (formerly Pharmacy in History, 1959–2020), will be published by the Press beginning in January 2021. AIHP is located at the University of Wisconsin–Madison School of Pharmacy.

AIHP executive director Dennis Birke says, “We look forward to working with the University of Wisconsin Press. With their capabilities and publishing expertise we can continue to place the highest priority on serving our members and community, while exploring new opportunities to broaden the reach of our journal.”

History of Pharmacy and Pharmaceuticals publishes original scholarly articles about the history of pharmacy and pharmaceuticals, broadly defined, including (but not limited to) the history of: pharmacy practice, pharmacy science, pharmacy education, drug regulation, social and cultural aspects of drugs and medicines, the pharmaceutical industry—including the history of pharmaceuticals, drugs, and therapeutics—and facets of the related medical sciences.

History of Pharmacy and Pharmaceuticals publishes two issues per year, and its online content can be found on JSTOR. The title joins the Press’s eleven other peer reviewed academic journals in the humanities and social sciences.

Toni Gunnison, Journals Manager at the University of Wisconsin Press, states, “We are thrilled to add this dynamic and well-established journal to our publishing program. We look forward to partnering with the AIHP, a fellow University of Wisconsin organization, to disseminate scholarship in support of the Wisconsin Idea.”

Biography and Economics in African History

The most recent issue of African Economic History, a special issue entitled “Biography and Economics,” is now available. The lead editor for this issue, Paul Lovejoy, explains his choice of theme:

The inspiration for this special issue on Biography and Economics was the realization that economic history often does not focus on individuals and what their personal testimonies can tell us about economics and economic relationships. The issue brings together five articles that address this theme in different ways; the first through the lens of Philip Quaque on the Gold Coast in the eighteenth century; the second the case of the Ologoudou family on the coast of the Bight of Benin; third through biographical perspectives on enslavement in the upper Guinea coast; fourth, through the memories of indentured women in Natal; and lastly through the autobiographical details found in the wills of freed Africans in Brazil.

This was the final issue for Lovejoy, who is now retired after more than 30 years of editing African Economic History. Browse the table of contents on Project MUSE.

African Economic History Welcomes New Editors

Following the retirement of longtime editor Paul E. Lovejoy, African Economic History has appointed two new editors. Earlier this year, George Bob-Milliar and Chétima Melchisedek joined the existing editorial team of Mariana Candido, Toyin Falola, and Toby Green. Together, the editors recently launched a social media presence for African Economic History, posting about current events related to African economies as well as important research in the field. You can follow AEH on Facebook and Twitter. Read on to learn more about the journal’s new editors.

George M. Bob-Milliar is a senior lecturer in the Department of History and Political Studies, Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (KNUST), Kumasi, one of the most prestigious public universities in Ghana. He joined the faculty of KNUST in August 2013 and has been involved in research, teaching, and mentoring of students at all levels. He is currently serving as the director of KNUST’s Centre for Cultural and African Studies (CeCASt). In 2012, Bob-Milliar received his PhD from the Institute of African Studies at the University of Ghana, the oldest center for African Studies on the continent. Trained as an interdisciplinary scholar, his research lies at the intersection of history, political ethnography, and development studies. He has published in the preeminent journals in his field of specialization. Bob-Milliar has been a visiting fellow at the University of Cambridge, Uganda’s Makerere University, and the Danish Institute for International Studies (DIIS), as well as a guest lecturer at the Johannes Gutenberg University, Mainz, Germany. In 2010, he received the inaugural African Author Prize for the best article published in African Affairs by an author based at an African institution, and in 2012 he was awarded a prize for his contribution to research on African policy issues from the Centre for International Governance Innovation. He sits on the editorial boards of African Affairs, African Review of Economics & Finance, and the Journal of Political Economy and Development.

Chétima Melchisedek is a Banting Postdoctoral Fellow at York University. Before coming to York, Melchisedek was a senior lecturer at the University of Maroua; a fellow at the Nantes Institute for Advanced Studies; the Gordon Henderson Fellow at the Human Rights Research and Education Centre, University of Ottawa; and a postdoctoral fellow at the Center for African Studies at the University of Basel. He earned a PhD in history from the Université Laval and a master’s degree from the University of Ngaoundéré in Cameroon. Melchisedek is a member of the editorial advisory board of the Canadian Journal of African Studies. His articles have appeared in the Historical Journal, African Studies Review, Canadian Journal of African Studies, Journal of Asian and African Studies, Cambridge Archaeological Journal, and Afrique Contemporaine, among others. His article in Cahiers d’Études Africaines (2015) was awarded the Prize for the Best Paper on Central Africa by the Central Africa Studies Association, while his paper in Africa Spectrum (2018) won the UFS/AS Young African Scholar Award. Melchisedek guest edited a special issue of the Canadian Journal of African Studies on “Boko Haram beyond the Media” (Volume 54 Number 2, 2020) and is currently co-editing, with Paul Lovejoy, a volume on Boko Haram and Political Distancing (Trenton: Africa World Press, 2021). Chétima is an affiliate member of the African Academy of Sciences and a founding member of the Cameroon Academy for Young Scientists.

Submissions open for the Brittingham & Felix Pollak Prizes, Judged by Carmen Giménez Smith

Carmen Giménez Smith standing in front of brick wall

The University of Wisconsin Press and the UW-Madison Program in Creative Writing are excited to announce that National Book Award Finalist Carmen Giménez Smith will judge this year’s Brittingham & Felix Pollak Prizes in Poetry. Any poet with an original, full-length, yet-to-be-published collection is eligible. Each manuscript will be considered for both $1,000 prizes. The winners and up to three finalists will have their books published as part of the University of Wisconsin Press’s Wisconsin Poetry Series. Submissions are open, and this year’s deadline is Tuesday, September 15.

Before visiting our Submittable page, please assemble a single pdf including a title page, a table of contents, your poems, and (optionally) an acknowledgments page listing any magazines or journals where the submitted poems may have first appeared. Your name and contact info should not appear anywhere in the document, or in the pdf file name. Manuscripts should be fifty to ninety pages in length on 8.5″ x 11″ pdf pages.

Simultaneous submissions are permitted, as long as the author agrees to withdraw the manuscript via the submissions manager if it is accepted elsewhere. If you have any questions, please first consult our FAQ. If you don’t find your answer, query Series Editors Sean Bishop and Ron Wallace at poetryseries@english.wisc.edu.

Recent titles in the Wisconsin Poetry Series

Queen in Blue by Ambalila Hemsell
No Day at the Beach by John Brehm
Fruit by Bruce Snider
Ganbatte by Sarah Kortemeier
If the House by Molly Spencer
Gloss by Rebecca Hazelton
Dear Terror, Dear Splendor by Melissa Crowe
House of Sparrows by Betsy Sholl
How the End First Showed by D. M. Aderibigbe
Why Can’t It Be Tenderness by Michelle Brittan Rosado

About This Year’s Judge
Carmen Giménez Smith is a former Guggenheim Fellow and the author of a memoir and six poetry collections, including Milk and Filth, a finalist for the 2013 National Book Critics Circle Award in poetry and Be Recorder, a finalist for a National Book Award and the PEN Open Book Award. She was awarded an American Book Award for Bring Down the Little Birds and the Juniper Prize for Poetry for her collection Goodbye, Flicker. She is the publisher of Noemi Press. With Steph Burt, she is the poetry editor of The Nation.

About the University of Wisconsin Press
The University of Wisconsin Press is a not-for-profit publisher of books and journals. With nearly 1,500 titles and over 8,000 peer-reviewed articles in print, its mission embodies the Wisconsin Idea by publishing work of distinction that serves the people of Wisconsin and the world.

For more information on the Wisconsin Poetry Prizes, please visit https://uwpress.wisc.edu/series/wi-poetry.html

30th Annual Midwest Book Award win for Dairylandia

We are thrilled to announce a Midwest Book Award winner from the University of Wisconsin Press! These awards from the Midwest Independent Publishing Association (MIPA) recognize quality in independent publishing in the Midwest (Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, Nebraska, North Dakota, Ohio, South Dakota, and Wisconsin).

Book cover showing Mona Lisa in Wisconsin Rose Bowl shirt painted on side of barn with cows in front.

Dairylandia: Dispatches from a State of Mind by Steve Hannah won the travel category. This book recounts Hannah’s love for his adopted state through his long-lived column, “State of Mind.” He profiles the lives of the seemingly ordinary yet quite (and quietly) extraordinary folks he met and befriended as he traveled the main streets and back roads of Wisconsin. From Norwegian farmers to a CIA-trained Laotian fighter to a woman who kept her favorite dead bird in the freezer, Hannah was charmed and fascinated by the kind and authentic folks he met. These captivating vignettes are by turns humorous, touching, and inspiring.

Congratulations again to the author and all involved!

What Changes Us

This month marks the publication of The Change: My Great American, Postindustrial, Midlife Crisis Tour by Lori Soderlind. In this week’s guest post, Lori reflects on journeys, crisis, and connection.

My mission for the road trip that became my book The Change was to visit the most depressing, god-forsaken, ruined little places I could find on a loop through this country and try to get to know them. It couldn’t get hard enough for me: guns, drug addiction, unemployment, mean dogs, religious zealotry, isolation, family tragedy, untreated mental illness, fouled drinking water, industrial waste, unresolved race wars, labor wars, civil war, merciless tornados, abandonment, crop failure, deindustrialization: bring it.

Cover showing a grey building with a blue sign and yellow letters next to a red building with a sign reading Croatia Club with a blue sky full of clouds

All of it.

I wanted to look it in the face and take it in.

Everywhere on the map, there it was: cities large and small and innumerable towns that had lost the energy they’d grown up from, and that now presented an inventory of pain in a country that had changed and did not understand why, and was suffering for these changes. I lived in New York City, where the view of the other 320 million people in this country can be very narrow, sadly. But I have traveled through the country with curiosity all my life and I loved exploring it, and I had become aware in the past decade of a real gloom out where I’d always wandered carelessly, and I wanted to know what had changed. Much of the visible evidence of the change was its ruins. All the old factories that cities grew up around, gutted; all the downtowns that had given places their identities now swallowed by sprawl or just plain abandoned. I wondered why all that could have happened and how it felt to see that pain, if you lived there, every day.

Much of the change had to do with a huge shift out of the American industrial age, and the loss of manufacturing. One example: Gloversville, New York, had been a great, bustling place back when it made gloves for the world; now, go there and you’ll find all the social ills you can name without encountering a single scrap of leather or a sewing machine. Change has come to American places through countless other evolutions: the rise of the interstate highway system, the decline of family farms, the advent of malls, the new cyber economy. What the changed places had in common was the grief they felt for what they’d lost. Once, each place existed for some reason that was an established reality, just like, once, newspapers were an established reality or train travel was an established reality or my cousin’s first marriage was an established reality. Change had come and so much established reality had been upended and people and places were grieving what was lost, as if it were all meant to last.

The Change has been released, now, in the midst of the global Covid-19 pandemic that has us aghast at how helpless we humans are, truly. We like reality to be a manageable and predictable thing, but we are reminded always—and now profoundly—that the living world is not so easily tamed. We of the country long regarded as exceptional, who felt all through the past century so breezily powerful: we hit full stop and faced daily the feeling of powerlessness. Nine weeks of quarantine as I write this, and we are, many of us, on our knees in a new posture that feels permanent, though this too will change. My city—New York City—has been hit worst of all, and is suffering. Our fear is much deeper than a fear of getting sick, of death by virus. We fear the collapse of systems we are utterly dependent on. We fear, in the midst of this unparalleled helplessness, that nothing of what we once knew and counted on will ever be the same. We see how vulnerable these structures we have built may truly be, and we are grieving before our house is even gone—because we are shocked to believe that all we have built really could fall down around us. That is how shaken we are, in New York City, in May of the year of Covid-19.

As I write this, a storm has taken the power out and I am alone in the dark in my house; lately, any respite from this sense of plunging into darkness is brief. We are shaken, but only as shaken as others in our country have been for a long, long time now. We are as shaken as a small steel-making town south of Pittsburgh where none of the kids pass standardized tests, and all of the storefronts are empty. We are as shaken as a broken mining town, or a rural desert. We know the country is divided, but to really know the sides is to measure their pain: Some have not worked in years, some lost their homes long ago, and then, too, some are simply Black in America. Others, meanwhile, have felt oddly invulnerable, and believed their fortune to be the norm. From where I sit today, it seems we are all, at once, saying foxhole prayers and hoping simply to survive.

It could be really good for us. It’s good to know this fear deeply, and to understand that our longing to survive is what, at core, connects us. It is basic, and human. If we can know that connection to each other, and see all of ourselves as beings trying to survive, we will have changed.

Not all of us, but enough of us will change. We’ll know what it is to watch the promises we’d built our lives on collapse, or to fear that they will and to hate this fear. We will know that really, such promises don’t exist. We have only ourselves, which is to say, each other. The same. The one thing we should learn to count on.

Lori Soderlind is an award-winning essayist and journalist, and author of the memoir Chasing Montana: A Love Story.

UW Press statement of solidarity

The University of Wisconsin Press unequivocally states that Black Lives Matter. We stand in solidarity with Black, Indigenous, and all people of color, and join our voices in condemning the violent deaths of Breonna Taylor, Tony McDade, George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery, Tony Robinson, and countless others at the hands of the police or vigilantes.

BIPOC leaders are again shining a bright light on the injustices of our state and our institutions. The violence against and murder of Black people occurs within the context of centuries-long racism, and more recently, amid a pandemic that is killing a disproportionate number of Black, Latinx, and Indigenous people.

We recognize that our own history includes many of the racist and white supremacist behaviors we reject. In academic publishing generally, and at UW Press, Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) are underrepresented in all areas: leadership, staff, authors, peer reviewers, and editors. As an organization, we acknowledge this and will seek to address it in all our processes and procedures. We are committed to using our platform to engage and amplify more BIPOC voices. True dedication to the Wisconsin Idea means embodying the principle that scholarship produced at the university should be available to and reflect the needs of everyone in the state.

Individually and collectively, we commit to listening and acting. We continue to educate ourselves on the cultural pervasiveness of white supremacy and our own internalized racism. We take responsibility for and are working to dismantle structures of inequality and replace them with sustained systems of support for BIPOC within ourselves, our communities, and our workplace.

To our BIPOC authors, vendors, colleagues, family, and neighbors: We see you and we hear you. We acknowledge your grief and righteous anger.

We can and will do better.

Be Careful What You Write About

This week, we celebrate the publication of Half! Author Sharon Harrigan shares how life can imitate art.

One of the joys of publishing a novel—unlike my first book, a memoir—is that I can tell anyone who sees herself in one of my characters: It’s not you! I made the whole thing up. What a relief to hide under the cover of fiction. But the truth is, like many novelists, I drew inspiration from my life to write Half. The intimacy between the identical twin sisters is based on the close bond I had with my brother, a year and a half older than me. And the girls’ larger-than-life, part hero/part monster father has a passing resemblance to my own.

Orange book cover with twin faces partially shown.

Here’s the surprising thing: recently my life seems to draw inspiration from my book, not the other way around. I can’t tell whether this turn of events is delightfully magical or just plain creepy. Maybe both.

In my novel, two siblings are so close they speak in one voice, until they can’t. They discover a secret that breaks their collective voice in half.

At the end of 2019, the advance readers’ copies had just gone out. My brother was visiting for Christmas, and we were walking my dog to the playground when he said, “I have something to tell you.” His voice hushed, even though no one but my cockapoo was anywhere near enough to overhear us. My brother is a professor, used to giving lectures and speeches, and usually words flow easily from him. But on that night, they came slowly. One. At. A. Time. He told me about a terrible event he hadn’t shared with anyone. I could hear, in his hesitation, how much it hurt.

I felt his pain. People use that phrase all the time, but they don’t usually mean a physical sensation. I do. Stress gives some people headaches; in others, it causes tight shoulders or a churning stomach. For me, stress stabs me in the throat. I developed a flu that resulted in a damaged nerve, paralyzing one of my two vocal cords. I posted the diagnosis on Facebook. “So funny,” my friends said. “You wrote a book about a voice breaking in half and then it happened to you!”

“I know,” I responded. “Be careful what you write about.”

Half ends in 2030, when climate change has resulted in a world that didn’t seem possible in the Before Times. It snows endlessly for months, the sky a white out.

In real life 2020, we muse wistfully about the pre-pandemic universe, a place we know will never exist in quite the same way again. It might as well be blizzarding for months, because we act as if we’re snowed in, barely ever leaving our houses.

In my fictional near future, “a fault line from Portland to Seattle caused the biggest earthquake in recent history. Sea levels rose and coastal houses, once worth millions, couldn’t be sold for scraps.” Will something like this happen in ten years? No one knows what the future will hold.

At least I don’t know. But my book—in its own magical or creepy or artfully mysterious way—just might.

author in black shirt with green background

Sharon Harrigan teaches at WriterHouse, a nonprofit literary center in Charlottesville, Virginia. She is the author of Playing with Dynamite: A Memoir. Her work has appeared in the New York Times (Modern Love), Narrative, Virginia Quarterly Review, and elsewhere.

Raising the Minimum Retirement Age: How Do Workers Respond?

As populations are aging, governments around the world are looking for ways to stretch pension programs to accommodate large numbers of retirees. One option is to raise the minimum retirement age, as Germany did in 1999, upping the retirement age for women from 60 to 63. Economists Johannes Geyer and Clara Welteke analyze the impacts of this policy shift in a Journal of Human Resources preprint article. They wanted to know whether women over 60 changed their labor market status as a result of the reform. Did employed women stay in their jobs longer or use unemployment or disability benefits as a way to exit the labor market? Geyer and Welteke joined us to discuss their findings.

Why did you decide to pursue this topic?

Population aging is an enormous challenge for the financial sustainability of public pension systems of many OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development) countries. Germany is facing a rapid increase in the old-age dependency ratio in the coming years. Already every second person in Germany is over 45 years old and every fifth person is over 66 years old. One way to increase the financial sustainability of the pay-as-you-go pension system is to increase the legal retirement age, thereby extending contribution periods whilst simultaneously decreasing pension expenditures. However, legal retirement age increases often have undesired distributional effects. Furthermore, workers may not be able or willing to work longer and may choose other exit routes from employment. Thus, it is of great importance to gain empirical evidence on the effects of pension reforms that increase retirement age thresholds. Our goal is to gain insights into the effects of this important question and inform policy makers.

What is one takeaway from this research that you’d like to communicate to policy makers?

The increase in the early retirement age for women in Germany resulted in a large employment increase in the affected age group (60- to 63-year-olds). One could conclude that the reform was a success and recommend similar measures for other countries and groups. However, the reform was successful in increasing employment because the labor market was in a good state and women were able to continue their employment. We also find that inactive and unemployed women remain longer in their respective status due to the reform. Another factor was the early announcement of the reform, which gave enough time to adjust career plans.

As a main takeaway, we recommend early retirement age increases as an effective tool to increase employment of the affected group, if labor market perspectives and the health of workers enable such an extension of their working life. Retirement age increases should be announced well in advance and those who are not able to work longer should be offered appropriate support, such as disability pension schemes.

What’s one question that emerged from your research that you’d like to follow up on, or that you hope someone else will explore in the future?

One of our results was that non-working women affected by the pension reform did not return to the labor market while employed women stayed in employment. In a follow-up project, we look at the distributional effects of the pension reform at the household level. More specifically, we wanted to know if the pension led to increased income inequality. Our results suggest that the distribution of available household income is not affected by the reform. One reason for this result is program substitution. The study is forthcoming in Labor Economics. In a current project, we look at health effects of the reform. We use administrative data from German health insurance that contain detailed information about individual diagnoses from medical practitioners’ records. Preliminary results suggest that the reform led to an increase of psychological symptoms.

What are some of the ways in which raising the retirement age could theoretically backfire on governments? Did you find any evidence that this is happening in the case of Germany?

The reform can be considered a success in retrospect. It did not lead to an increase in unemployment or large increases in disability pensions. However, the positive employment effect is strongly related to the good labor market performance at the time. Our results also show that women at this pre-retirement age do not react very flexibly to changing conditions. The results would have been different if Germany had experienced a large recession. Interestingly, this result is also found in other countries, like Australia and Austria. Therefore, governments should also invest more in labor market opportunities for older workers and develop better strategies to bring the older unemployed back to work.

Johannes Geyer is deputy head of the department of public economics at DIW Berlin. He earned his PhD in Economics in 2012. Between 2012 and 2016 he was a visiting professor at Humboldt-Universität Berlin, in addition to his work at the DIW Berlin. His research focuses on issues of social protection and demographic change. For this he uses empirical methods of microeconometrics and microsimulation.

Clara Welteke is an economist at the German Federal Ministry of Finance since April 2019. Her work focuses on pension provision and the sustainability of public finances. Previously, Clara was a researcher at the Public Economics Department and the Gender Economics Research Group at the DIW Berlin. Clara received her PhD from the Free University Berlin and the DIW Graduate Center in 2017. She holds a Bachelor’s degree in Philosophy & Economics from the University of Bayreuth and a Master’s degree in Econometrics and Mathematical Economics from the University of Amsterdam. After completing her Master’s degree, Clara worked as a consultant for the World Bank. During her doctoral studies, she worked for the OECD in Paris and the European Commission in Brussels.