In this session, PhD researchers, Balthazar de Robiano, Lorenzo Mascioli, and Milan Thies will present their ongoing doctoral research.
'Tenure inequalities in changing housing regimes'
Balthazar de Robiano (Doctoral researcher, EUI)
Discussant: Bence Kováts (Max Weber Fellow, EUI)
Abstract:
The economic literature posits that increases in homeownership rates and housing prices levels inequalities because it increases the wealth holdings of the middle class. While in the last decades both homeownership levels have increased while housing prices have risen strikingly quicker than incomes in most wealth countries, both income and wealth inequalities have been shown to have risen substantially. I will present this puzzle and a theoretical framework to explain why mortgage based financialisation - the mechanism behind the increase in homeownership rates and in housing prices - has increased inequalities because it has increased tenure inequalities even though the form and extent of those increases in tenure inequalities vary with the complementarities between the national dynamics of financialisation and countries' housing regimes' characteristics. I will present exploratory research on this subject through the case of Belgium, where despite low- and stable-income inequalities (an important potential confounder), such tenure inequalities can be found to have risen.
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'Places of welfare: Using quantitative network analysis to capture the genius loci'
Lorenzo Mascioli (Doctoral researcher, EUI)
Discussant: Johannes Karremans (Post-doctoral Researcher, EUI)
Abstract:
Against a backdrop of member state convergence, the EU is brimming with "places that don’t matter" (Andrés Rodríguez-Pose, 2017). A debate has emerged in academia and public policy about the welfare of these places. If territorial laissez-faire was popular before the financial crisis, today's dispute is largely between sectoralism, which proposes fiscal redistribution combined with sectoral interventions, and territorialism, which champions policies that tap into the idiosyncratic potential of each place. Territorialism is normatively more appealing but raises practical problems, as finding out about this potential is not straightforward. The method we frequently use, the case study, falls short of external validity. Here I propose an alternative method for discovering how places (can) produce local welfare. Applying quantitative network analysis to project data, I reconstruct the networks responsible for cohesion policy in Italian municipalities and measure their structure and composition. Albeit less internally valid than the case study, this method allows for systematic replication across space and time. I also present preliminary results for a sample of thirty municipalities.
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'The Bureaucratic Politics of Social Investment.'
Milan Thies (Doctoral researcher, EUI)
Discussants: Nina Lopez-Uroz (PhD Researcher, EUI) and Steven Ballantyne (PhD Researcher, EUI)
Abstract:
Bureaucracies matter in the policy process. Politicians rely on information provided by bureaucrats, bureaucrats are willing to use their informational advantage to influence political decisions and the way information is presented matters for the policy preferences of politicians. However, bureaucrats are mostly absent from analyses of welfare state- and social investment reforms that instead emphasise societal drivers such as the competition between political parties, public opinion or firm behaviour. In this chapter I argue that bureaucracies - under certain conditions - become an important driving force for the occurrence and direction of policy change in European political economies. As social investment reforms are often less present in public debates than reforms of compensatory social policy, they are likely cases of bureaucratic bottom-up influence. Confronted with strong pressures to increase the productivity of the domestic workforce and an increasing flexibilisation of employment, bureaucrats advocate the expansion of governmental social investment policies.
Hybrid event. The link to the session will be provided following registration.