News & Events

Events

• On 16^th October 2025, Cesare Riillo presented the main findings from the 2024/2025 Global Entrepreneurship Monitor (GEM) report for Luxembourg, titled “Entrepreneurship grows in Luxembourg as AI provokes both optimism and fear” at the House of Entrepreneurship in Kirchberg.
• In July, we hosted the International Society for Quality-of-Life Studies (ISQOLS) conference in Luxembourg, welcoming 470 participants from nearly 70 countries over 4 days. The event featured 4 keynotes, a roundtable, and 440+ presentations—including 20 special sessions—focused on the theme: "Redefining Progress: Achieving Sustainable Well-Being for All." See news coverage by the Chronicle.lu here and here, and by InfoGreen (Fench).
• Highlighted by Research Luxembourg as one of ten research results in July, Francesco Sarracino and Kelsey O’Connor published “Governments should prioritize well-being over economic growth” in the renowned journal Nature Human Behaviour. See the news release here. 

STATEC Research in the News

• The GEM report received notable recognition and was highlighted on science.lu under the title “Entrepreneuriat au Luxembourg : 9,9 % des résidents ont lancé une entreprise en 2024”. It was also selected as one of the 10 studies for October by Research Luxembourg, in the article titled “Entrepreneurship on the Rise in Luxembourg, with AI and Sustainability in Focus”.
• Paperjam (French) discussed our team’s planned contribution to World Happiness Report 2025, focusing on deaths of despair and pro-social behavior around the world.
• The Luxembourg Times and chronicle.lu reported the release of the GEM Report 2023-2024 in May 2024.
• L'essentiel (French), Luxemburger Wort (German), and Paperjam (French) featured our study, “Dissatisfied employees are three times more likely to quit: Evidence from the Luxembourg Global Entrepreneurship Monitor”.

Recent Grants, Awards, & Recognition

• In June 2024, “Neo-humanism and COVID-19: Opportunities for a socially and environmentally sustainable world,” authored by Francesco Sarracino and Kelsey O'Connor, and published in the Applied Research in Quality of Life Studies, received the 2023 Best Annual ARQOL Paper Award from the International Society for Quality-of-Life Studies.
• Giulia Slater was awarded the 2024 Best Dissertation Award for her doctoral thesis, "Essays on Social Capital and Wellbeing" from the International Society for Quality of Life Studies (ISQOLS). In addition, she received the ISQOLS 2024 Post-Doc Research Fellowship, a grant intended to support one postdoctoral candidate conducting research in quality-of-life, happiness, and/or wellbeing studies.
  

Presentations

• In October, Fengyu Wu presented “Consumption Expenditures, Social Capital, and Subjective Well-being: Evidence from Australia” at the 10th Luxembourg Workshop on Household Finance and Consumption in Luxembourg.
• In October, Nikos Rigas presented “Rebound Effect – A Sisyphean Effort or a Chimera? Evidence from Transient, Persistent and Energy Efficiency in European Industries” at the 11th Conference on the Economics of Natural Resources and the Environment, held online.
• In September, Xi Chen presented “How Does Relative Positioning in the Global Value Chain Affect Labour Productivity Growth?” at the 27th INFER Annual Conference in Rome, Italy.
• In September, Nikos Rigas presented “Analyzing Well-Being Efficiency Using the World Happiness Report” at the 11th International Workshop on Efficiency in Education, Health and Other Public Services in Budapest, Hungary.
• In September, Kelsey O’Connor presented “The Easterlin Paradox” at the Workshop in Honor of Richard Easterlin in Paris, France.
• In July, Giulia Slater, Fengyu Wu, and Nikos Rigas presented “The Costs of Social and Environmental Degradation in Affluent Economies”, “Consumption Expenditures, Social Capital, and Subjective Well-being: Evidence from Australia”, and “Analyzing Well-Being Efficiency Using the World Happiness Report” respectively at the WISER Annual Meeting and the International Society for Quality of Life Studies (ISQOLS) Annual Conference in Luxembourg.
• In July, Kelsey O’Connor delivered two presentations — “Supporting Others: How Prosocial Behaviour Reduces Deaths of Despair” and “The Happiness Revolution in Europe” — at the International Society for Quality of Life Studies (ISQOLS) Annual Conference in Luxembourg.
• In June, Kelsey O’Connor presented “Does Well-being Governance Enhance Well-being?” at the the Renaissance in Economics 2nd International Conference in Florence, Italy.
• In June, Golnaz Amjadi presented “Eco-efficiency Gaps: Evidence from 22 European Countries” at the 31st Ulvön Environmental Economics Conference in Ulvön, Sweden.
• In June, Nikos Rigas presented “Analyzing Well-Being Efficiency Using the World Happiness Report” at IAMO 2025 in Halle (Saale), Germany.
• In June, Fengyu Wu presented “The Health Impacts of Relaxing Internal Migration Policies: Quasi-experimental Evidence from China” at the International Association for Applied Econometrics Annual Conference in Turin, Italy.
• In May and June, Giulia Slater presented “The Costs of Social and Environmental Degradation in Affluent Economies” at the 2025 RSA Annual Conference – Navigating Regional Transformation in Porto, Portugal, the Renaissance in Economics 2nd International Conference in Florence, Italy, and the ISEE Degrowth 2025 Conference in Oslo, Norway.
• In May, Kelsey O’Connor presented “Does Well-being Governance Enhance Well-being?” at the 2nd Welfare & Policy Conference in Bordeaux, France.
• In April, Fengyu Wu presented “The Health Impacts of Relaxing Internal Migration Policies: Quasi-experimental Evidence from China” at the Workshop on Labour Economics 2025 at Trier University, Germany.
• In March, Kelsey O’Connor presented “Analyzing Well-Being Efficiency Using the World Happiness Report” at the WISER Workshop South Africa in South Africa.
• In March, Fengyu Wu was invited to present “Supporting Others: How Prosocial Behaviour Reduces Deaths of Despair” at the World Happiness Report Asian Launch, held online.
• In March, Francesco Sarracino gave an update on WP5 at the WISER Mid-term Review Meeting, held online.
• In February, Cesare Riillo presented “Leveraging Large Language Models to Decode Luxembourg’s Entrepreneurial Ecosystem” and “Gender and Immigration as Drivers of Sustainable Entrepreneurship: Insights from Luxembourg, Germany, and Canada” at the GEM Annual Meeting in Bilbao, Spain.
• In February, Chiara Peroni presented "Are happy people succesful entrepreneurs?" as part of the School of Economics seminar series organised by the University of East Anglia in Norwich, UK.
• In February, Cesare Riillo presented "Entrepreneurship and income inequality: Evidence from cross-country pseudo panel data" at the 2025-2nd III/LIS Comparative Economic Inequality Conference 2025 in Luxembourg.
• Fengyu Wu, Giulia Slater, and Kelsey O’Connor presented the papers "Mitigating life challenges to subjective well-being through civic engagement: Insights from a global perspective", "Estimating defensive consumption: The cost of social and environmental disruption", and "Does well-being governance enhance well-being?" at the BeWell Meeting 2025 organised by the BeWell Network and Freie Universität in Germany, in February.
• In February, Kelsey O’Connor presented "The happiness revolution in Europe" as part of the Measuring Progress Seminar Series organised by STATEC Research in Luxembourg.
• In January, Francesco Sarracino presented “STATEC Research: Organization and research topics” at the Annual Retreat of the ACROSS PhD School in Luxembourg.
• In January, Giulia Slater presented "The trust paradox" at the Civil economy: An old-new paradigm conference, organised by LUMSA University in Rome.
• Xi Chen was invited to present "Intangible capital and labour productivity growth in Luxembourg" at the Economic Policy Committee organised by the European Commission in January in Brussels.