Venue: Aula

Mark your calendar for our upcoming EPT Section Day
Join us for a day full of engaging and valuable activities!

More exciting details will follow soon.

Regards,
Nynke Boiten, Ryan Timms and Monica Natanael

Venue: Room-31.C1.060

This paper revisits the relationship between firm’s offshoring activities within global value chains and relative wages. It builds on the existing literature but adds two important elements. First, it associates offshoring with moving capital abroad, that is, foreign direct investment (FDI), which is fully in line with the theoretical models of offshoring from the international trade literature (Feenstra and Hanson, 1996). Second, given that FDI is the carrier for offshoring, the empirical model developed features FDI in fabrication as the central measure for offshoring (Grossman and Rossi-Hansberg, 2008; Baldwin and Robert-Nicoud, 2014). By focusing on a specific value chain function, namely fabrication activities, our empirical specification is again much closer to the spirit of trade-based models of offshoring which portray offshoring as the shift of value chain activities or ‘tasks’ of varying skill-intensity. Moreover, the fact that fabrication was shown to be the lowest productivity function along the value chain (Stöllinger and Haraguchi, 2026) also allows us to specify a specific type of offshoring, namely low productivity functions (or tasks), which theory predicts are less skill-intensive. This allows us formulating much cleaner predictions than existing (narrow and broad) measures of offshoring (Feenstra and Hanson,1999), which are based on the import of intermediate goods. In our empirical strategy, we follow Foster-McGregor et al. (2013) and estimate Seemingly Unrelated Regression (SUR) model using the cost share of low-skilled, medium-skilled and high-skilled labour, as the dependent variable. Estimating this model for a set of 23 EU member states over the period 2003-2022, we find that offshoring of fabrication activities reduces the demand for low- and medium skilled labour but not for high-skilled labour. This is in line with the theoretical trade literature in the case of offshoring of low-skill intensive value chain functions. These results are robust to controlling for conventional measures of offshoring such as backward and forward GVC participation.

Venue: Room-31.C1.060

As we continue with the Journal Club, the next session will be held on the 20th of October and will focus on research related to operational safety economics. For the purpose of an interesting discussion, I’ve attached two related papers on economics of safety / ALARP-style decision making and how to support quantitative safety investment choices.

Paper 1 (Talarico & Reniers, 2016, Process Safety and Environmental Protection) develops an investment decision model combining NPV with the Disproportion Factor (DF). It explains how to compute a critical value of DF (where NPV = 0) for different safety options and accident scenarios, to help rank measures economically (especially for type II risks or HILP / high-consequence low-probability cases).
Paper 2 (Achille et al., 2017, Safety Science) proposes an adjusted DF (DF*) that integrates societal acceptability of risks (SAR). It operationalizes SAR via 11 indicators, validated through factor analysis, and then uses a scoring system + weight factors to adjust DF in a way that should make decisions more socially defensible (not only “math-correct”).

Questions for discussion:
How do you see the best way to connect these two perspectives—i.e., using DF-based economic ranking (Paper 1) while also incorporating societal acceptability (Paper 2) into the DF itself (DF*)—without making the results too subjective?
Have you previously used economic analysis/assessment in your research? What about the Disproportion Factor, would it be useful in a certain context/circumstances in your research? How to use the ALARP principle taking micro-economics into consideration?

Looking forward to seeing you the 20th of October!

Recent developments in the AI world have brought attention to the risks of increasingly autonomous AI systems. In July, autonomous OpenAI agents conducting cybersecurity evaluations circumvented containment measures and compromised systems at Hugging Face. Recent warnings from Anthropic researchers have explicitly raised the possibility that advanced AI could pose an extinction-level risk, prompting concerns about stricter oversight and safeguards. In this cluster meeting, we will have a panel disucssion on what these recent incidents tell us about emerging risks from agentic AI, what it means for worries about alignment, accountability and regulation, and how seriously we should take extreme future risks into both our technical and ethical assessments.

Feel free to join us for a lively discussion! If you'd like to keep informed about the Risk & Uncertainty Cluster, feel free to email Kritika (k.maheshwari@tudelft.nl)

Venue: C1-060

Venue: TPM

Morning – Room A1.370 (Faculty Boardroom)

09:45-10:00 Coffee & welcome
10:00-11:15 Romy Eskens (Utrecht) – Debts of Agency: A Theory of Positive Accountability Attitudes
11:15-11:30 Break
11:30-12:40 James Hutton (TU Delft) – "The Pretence of Moral Sense": Re-Assessing Kant's Attack on Moral Empiricism
    
12:40-14:00 Lunch (on campus, own expense)

Afternoon – Room B1.300

14:00-15:15 Alfred Archer (Tilburg) – Feelings of Fate
15:15-15:30 Break
15:45-17:00 Lilith Lee (VU Amsterdam) – Lim Boon Keng on the Evolution of Benevolence as a Moral-Political Virtue
17:00 Pub

For informatie and registration: philevents.org/event/show/152513

Venue: C1-060

Venue: Theater de Veste, Delft

The Van Hasselt Lecture is jointly organised by the Department of Values, Technology and Innovation at the Faculty of Technology, Policy and Management and Studium Generale TU Delft.

"Free Speech and Experimentality"

Why do liberal societies value free speech so highly? Political philosopher Robert Simpson (UCL) argues that one ethical foundation of free speech is the ideal of experimentality: there is value in people testing boundaries and defying established norms. Drawing on the cultural politics of popular music, Simpson explores both the promise of experimentality and the question of whether norm-breaking really deserves the esteem we often give it.

Van Hasselt Lecture
The annual Van Hasselt Lecture addresses topics around ethics, peace and justice in our technological age. The lecture was named after Frans van Hasselt, a student in Delft, who denounced the firing of Jewish professors at the university in a public speech on the 23rd of November 1940. He was arrested by the occupying forces and died at Buchenwald concentration camp two years later.

Free admission / Registration is required: www.theaterdeveste.nl/programma/van-hasseltlezing-robert-simpson-nlbc

Venue: C1-060