15522
Seminar
WiSe 22/23: The fiscal state in crisis
Lukas Hakelberg
Comments
The state-building literature as long recognised the importance of moments of crisis for the development of fiscal capacity. Historically, these moments of crises have most often been wars. Scholars have associated wars with rising tax revenue, the introduction of modern taxes, and an increase in the progressivity of the tax system. They have tested these causal relationships in different world regions and with different definitions of war. More recently, the literature has also begun to investigate the impact of crises other than war on fiscal capacity, including banking crises, economic depression, and pandemics. What we still know fairly little about is what happens when several crises combine into polycrisis, an increasingly popular description for our current historical moment. The aim of this seminar is thus to draw on previous scholarship linking crises to fiscal capacity to better understand how the current combination of climate crisis, Covid-19 pandemic, and Russian aggression impacts fiscal states across the world.
We proceed in four steps. In a first step, we’ll discuss the basics of fiscal policy and research design. In a second step, we’ll discuss the most important research on the causal relationship between crises and fiscal capacity, paying particular attention to the research design the authors apply. In a third step, we reverse the research design process. Students organise in groups putting themselves in the position of the author of an important work on fiscal capacity and developing a research proposal that could have stood at the beginning of her research endeavour. In a fourth step, students will systematically help each other in getting from our general research topic to a puzzle and research question that they can then use as starting point for a term paper or master thesis.
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16 Class schedule
Regular appointments
Mon, 2022-10-17 14:00 - 16:00
Mon, 2022-10-24 14:00 - 16:00
Mon, 2022-10-31 14:00 - 16:00
Mon, 2022-11-07 14:00 - 16:00
Mon, 2022-11-14 14:00 - 16:00
Mon, 2022-11-21 14:00 - 16:00
Mon, 2022-11-28 14:00 - 16:00
Mon, 2022-12-05 14:00 - 16:00
Mon, 2022-12-12 14:00 - 16:00
Mon, 2023-01-02 14:00 - 16:00
Mon, 2023-01-09 14:00 - 16:00
Mon, 2023-01-16 14:00 - 16:00
Mon, 2023-01-23 14:00 - 16:00
Mon, 2023-01-30 14:00 - 16:00
Mon, 2023-02-06 14:00 - 16:00
Mon, 2023-02-13 14:00 - 16:00