Leon Küstermann

“Managers of change: How firms shape whether modernization leads to polarization”

Leon Küstermann is a PhD researcher at the European University Institute and works in the ERC project Wellbeing Returns on Social Investment Recalibration. In his PhD project, he analyzes how welfare states shape social and political outcomes of economic modernization driven by technological change. In particular, he focuses on firms as an intermediate layer between institutions, societal transformations, and people’s experiences of them. The paper presentation at the In_equality Conference 2024looks at the role of firms in influencing whether workers feel threatened by economic transformations using German firm-level data matched to the German Socioeconomic Panel. As part of his PhD, Leon visited Aarhus University to work with Danish register data for the second part of his project. Before his PhD, he graduated with a MSc in Comparative Social Policy from the University of Oxford.