New study: What do ChatGPT and deep fakes do to democracy? The ITA is investigating this question on behalf of the Austrian Parliament.
![](/fileadmin/_processed_/9/a/csm_P_KI-demokratie_klitschko_5bd82344ae.jpeg)
Steffen is an economist and social scientist with a research focus on institutional and evolutionary political economy and joined ITA in 2018.
Steffen holds a Bachelor's degree in Economics from the University of Heidelberg and a Master's degree in Socio-Ecological Economics & Policy (SEEP) from the Vienna University of Economics and Business, which he completed with a thesis on institutional frameworks for public goods. In 2021, he earned his PhD from Central European University (CEU) with a dissertation on the diffusion and development of energy storage systems.
After an internship at the economic development agency of the city of Osnabrück he worked as a student assistant at the interdisciplinary institute FEST in Heidelberg on welfare indicators. In Vienna, he worked as a graduate student assistant and methods tutor at the institute for ecological economics at Vienna University of Economics and Business.