Research
Ongoing research projects.
Work in Progress
A reform-oriented approach to political parties’ revealed social preferences
with Felix Bierbrauer, Maximilian Blömer, Lilly Fischer, Emanuel Hansen and Andreas Peichl
Abstract
We present a new methodological approach to measure the redistributive preferences of political parties based on their election proposals. This approach builds on the marginal value of public funds (MVPF) framework. We recover the welfare weight associated with a small reform as the inverse of its MVPF. The aggregated welfare weights of multiple small reform proposals for each party and election year provide measures of the parties' redistributive preferences along the income distribution. Leveraging this approach, we use a rich structural microsimulation model to estimate the MVPFs and their associated welfare weights for more than 300 proposed reforms of the tax-transfer system by Germany's five largest parties from 1990 until 2021. Our results allow to study the differences in the redistributive preferences between German parties and over time.Designing redistribution with endogenous transfer take-up
with Spencer Bastani and Emanuel Hansen