Public economics, political economics, behavioural economics c[dot]de-meulenaer[at]lse.ac.ukcopy
/klo-eh duh mö-luh-nar/
I'm a PhD student in economics at the London School of Economics. My research lies at the intersection of public, behavioural, and political economics. I use custom surveys to explore the formation of policy preferences towards inequality reduction, and the mechanisms underlying those preferences.
I am especially interested in understanding the disconnect between the policies that economists identify as optimal, the policies that citizens support, and the policies that governments implement.
What do policies do? Beliefs and support for economic policies
(working paper on request)
When people disagree on economic policy, is it a conflict of values, or a conflict of beliefs about what policies do? Using a large survey of over 7,000 French respondents, I measure beliefs about the effect of 29 economic reforms in a fully comparable way, along with a rich array of attitudes, preferences, and demographic variables. I find that the reform’s perceived impact on growth is the single strongest predictor of support, followed by self-interest, and its impact on the wellbeing of minimum wage workers. Beliefs about a reform’s impact represent 82% of the explained variation in support, while attitudes that are not policy-specific (such as zero-sum thinking or trust in government) explain only 17%. Left- and right-wing participants have starkly different beliefs, and those differences explain most of the explained partisan gap. By contrast, the mapping of beliefs to support is similar on the left and the right, implying both sides agree on what a good reform should do. Lastly, beliefs explain better than attitudes participants’ preference for predistribution over redistribution. This project identifies policy-specific beliefs as a key, so far underexplored determinant of public support for economic policies.
We use natural language processing to classify all redistributive speeches in the U.S. Congress and Norwegian parliament from 2015 to 2022. The Norwegian redistributive debate is markedly more pro-redistribution than the U.S. debate. While American legislators invoke fairness to argue for redistribution and efficiency to argue against it, the Norwegian debate does not align with the traditional equity-efficiency divide. Norwegian legislators often argue that inequality itself has socially inefficient consequences, such as lower trust, more crime, or weaker productivity (inequality externalities). In both settings, externality-based arguments are more likely to appeal to logic and consensus, while fairness arguments express more anger and compassion. In a U.S. survey experiment, fairness arguments induce more outrage but are not more convincing on average. Our results document two distinct ways to argue for redistribution, and suggest that the classic equity-efficiency dichotomy could be less universal than often assumed.
Attitudes towards the inheritance tax and demand for redistribution(working paper on request)
I use new survey data from France to explore attitudes towards the inheritance tax and demand for redistribution. Although the inheritance tax is very unpopular, respondents show significant support for redistributive forms of taxation, namely for taxing capital income and the bequests of parents who have themselves inherited. I also find that a large share of the variation in support for the inheritance tax is explained by whether participants believe that taxes mostly enhance fairness or harm the economy. This suggests that some respondents' apparently low demand for redistribution may stem from their lack of trust in the power of taxes to effectively redistribute. I then analyze how these preferences shift when exposed to two arguments: one highlighting wealth inequality, the other defending parents' right to bequeath their hard-earned savings. The inequality argument increases support for the inheritance and capital income taxes. Surprisingly, the second argument also increases support for the capital income tax and mildly increases support for the inheritance tax. I interpret this last finding as evidence of backfiring, echoing the strong political polarization on the topic of the inheritance tax.
Work in progress
Perceptions of tax evasion and tax enforcement with Daniel Reck
