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.
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.
Travail, famille, patrimoine: Unpacking the unpopularity of the inheritance tax(working paper on request)
Global health inequality: Cross-country comparisons using admin data Plotting the relationship between income and life expectancy in Belgium, as part of a large international project led by
Raj Chetty
and
Maria Polyakova
