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 200 proposed reforms of the tax-transfer system by Germany's five largest parties from 2005 until 2025. Our results show that German political parties broadly assign higher welfare weights to low-income earners and do not specifically target middle incomes as suggested by political economy arguments.

Designing redistribution with endogenous transfer take-up
with Spencer Bastani and Emanuel Hansen

Abstract Governments redistribute resources through mandatory income taxes, but also through transfer programs with limited take-up rates. We study the implications of endogenous transfer take-up in a model that incorporates heterogeneity in skill and labor supply responses at the intensive and extensive margins. Based on this model, we derive (i) conditions for the existence of Pareto-improving tax/transfer reforms, (ii) formulas that characterize welfare-maximizing policies, and (iii) the inverse optimal weights that make an observed tax/transfer system optimal. In the empirical part, we apply these tools and identify Pareto-improving reforms of the German tax-transfer system.