Welcome! I am a Doctoral Researcher in Political Science at the University of Cologne. I study (historical) political economy with a focus on voting behavior, redistribution, and fiscal policy.
Publications
Austerity and Social Spending: Estimating the Long-Run Effects of Fiscal Adjustment
Abstract
Ageing populations and slower growth have compelled governments in mature welfare states to implement fiscal adjustments, but uncertainty persists about whether these measures have successfully curtailed the size of the welfare state. This letter documents that fiscal adjustments reduce social spending more effectively than previously thought. Using data from sixteen advanced economies between 1978 and 2018 and the narrative identification of adjustment plans, I estimate cumulative multipliers with local projections. I find that fiscal adjustments persistently lower social spending, including key components of social consumption and social investment. To explain why austerity does not shelter the welfare state, I present stylized facts about the timing and composition of adjustment plans. First, while public investment cuts concentrate at the beginning of the adjustment period, social consumption cuts accumulate over time. Second, large budget deficits and financial crises are frequent antecedents of the most ambitious fiscal reforms.
Projects
From Wealth to Welfare: How Economic Elites Made Inequality Work
Abstract
Why do advanced economies engage in substantial income transfers but scarcely redistribute wealth? This paper explains this pattern through an insurance theory of income redistribution, which posits that wealth inequality historically led economic elites to expand income transfers to propertyless households. I study this proposition in the context of landholding inequality in Prussia. Estate owners, I argue, used income transfers to offset the economic insecurities of landless workers who could not rely on landownership as insurance against income loss. I digitize surveys of local poor relief and exploit Prussia's administrative structure, where estates functioned as local authorities. The results show that landholding inequality caused higher income transfers to the poor, driven by the redistributive actions of estate owners. Estate owners allocated relief as social protection over the life cycle for households outside of the active workforce. This commitment to insurance was associated with greater voter support for the political order.
Coal Rush: The Built Legacy of the Industrial Revolution and the Rise of the Radical Right
Abstract
Historical industrial centers have shifted to the right but have done so at different speeds and intensities. We argue that this variation can be explained by differences in the historical industrialization process. Communities that industrialized later and more intensively realign more toward the radical right today. This is because the built environment shaped by the original industrialization drives demographic persistence and neighborhood disadvantage. To examine our argument, we study the effects of nineteenth-century coal mining in Germany's Ruhr area. We match the geolocation of over 1,000 mining shafts, historical plant-level employment data, and the spread of company housing with contemporary electoral results at the neighborhood level. For identification, we exploit the depth of coal deposits that governed the adoption of deep-shaft mining. The findings demonstrate how the path of economic development influences voting in the long run.
Not in My Basement: The Political Costs of Climate Reforms
Abstract
When do clean-energy reforms provoke public backlash? We argue that perceived economic exposure, often imperfectly related to actual material impact, and political narratives are key drivers of opposition. We test this claim in the context of Germany's heating reform, which aimed to phase out fossil-fuel systems. Using synthetic control and difference-in-differences methods, we show that the reform's announcement increased support for the radical right and decreased support for the Greens, while actual exposure led to gains for the mainstream center-right. Drawing on large-scale, AI-assisted qualitative interviews, we document that narratives linking the law to steep heating costs characterized beliefs even among households not materially affected. These misperceptions varied by partisanship and were tied to broader concerns about government overreach. Our findings show how political narratives amplify perceived economic threats and drive mass opposition to climate reforms.
Social Protection and the Vote Against Democracy: Evidence From the Weimar Republic
Abstract
Economic crises often precede episodes of fundamental political upheaval. Although this relationship is well-documented in empirical research, much less is known about the extent to which social protection, by shielding voters from material hardship, can mitigate the political costs of economic shocks. I examine this question in the context of the late Weimar Republic. To understand how welfare generosity could have influenced voting behavior in an environment of fiscal austerity, I show that the Weimar Republic maintained a well-developed local welfare system that incorporated workers who lost access to federal insurance due to fiscal cutbacks. I leverage differences in local welfare generosity to study whether social protection attenuated the rise of the Nazi Party. Using standard benefit rates before the crisis and the predemocratic legacy of social policy development for identification in an instrumental variable design, I show that more generous welfare rates reduced support for the Nazi Party in the elections after the fiscal consolidation episode. This study contributes to our understanding of how welfare states shape voting behavior during crises and qualifies existing accounts of welfare retrenchment in the final years of the Weimar Republic.
Abstract
We study the impact of fiscal news shocks on household consumption and economic expectations through two survey experiments conducted in the United States. To causally identify the effect of a news shock, we first implement an information provision experiment in which respondents receive varying information about the projected growth rate of real federal government spending for the upcoming year. Second, we employ a vignette experiment that allows respondents to revise their macroeconomic expectations in response to a hypothetical government spending increase with different components. Our findings show that while households initially adjust their fiscal expectations in response to the news shock, these updates are not persistent over time. The fiscal news shock significantly raises inflation expectations in the short run but has no measurable effect on personal household consumption. Additional evidence from the vignette experiment and respondents' mental models of fiscal expansions consistently shows that households predominantly perceive fiscal interventions as inflationary.