This year Osteuropa-Institut is proud to welcome Prof. Panu Poutvaara, Director of the ifo Center for Migration and Development Economics and Professor of Economics at the University of Munich, for the annual Richard-Löwenthal Lecture.

Prof. Panu Poutvaara, PhD, studied economics at the University of Helsinki in Finland and received his doctorate there in 2002. Since 2010, he has been Professor of Economics at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München (LMU) and Director of the ifo Center for Migration and Development Economics. He has been a member of Germany’s Expert Council for Integration and Migration since 2019. He has advised the European Parliament, the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, German Ministry of Finance, the French Senate and the Finnish Government. His current research areas include international migration, political economics and public economics. His research focuses include migrant self-selection and integration, return and return prospects of Ukrainian refugees, the impact of migration opportunities on human capital formation, populism, and the welfare effects of immigration. His research has been published in leading economics journals, such as JEEA, the Economic Journal, and the Journal of Public Economics, and covered by numerous media outlets, such as The Economist, the New York Times, The Atlantic and Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung.

Richard-Löwenthal Lecture 2025 is titled "Return and Return Intentions of Ukrainian Refugees".

Russian full-scale invasion of Ukraine on 24 February 2022 forced millions of Ukrainians to leave their homes. As of December 2024, around 5 million Ukrainians lived in other European countries, excluding Russia and Belarus. Whether refugees return is of crucial importance to Ukraine, but also of great interest to the host countries. This lecture gives an overview of return and return intentions of Ukrainian refugees, using an ongoing panel survey that started in 2022. The panel survey allows studying how return and return intentions relate to local conflict intensity in refugees’ home municipality, and how liberation of home district affects return and return intentions. Finally, the panel survey has collected expectations about the outcome of the war. This allows studying how changes in war expectations are correlated with changes in return plans.

Date: 11.06.2025
Time: 4 p.m
Venue: Hörsaal A, Osteuropa-Institut, Garystr. 55 14195 Berlin

About the Löwenthal lecture series

The Richard Löwenthal Lectures are a series of annual public lectures given by renowned scholars on Eastern Europe and the post-Soviet space at the Institute for East European Studies. Richard Löwenthal (1908-1991) was a political scientist and professor at the Freie Universität Berlin from 1961-1974. He was a socialist who was involved in the resistance against the Nazis and, after returning from exile, carried out research on totalitarianism, National Socialism and the politics in Eastern Europe.