PhD Researchers in Political Economy at Leiden University

The researchers will work on the `Micro-foundations of Debt Crises’ project, funded by the European Research Council (ERC) and led by Dr. Matthew DiGiuseppe. This project takes a bottom-up approach to understanding the political roots of government debt crises.

This project pursues two successive objectives. First, the project will conduct the first comprehensive analysis of individual-level preferences for debt reduction before a crisis. It will develop and test multiple hypotheses that seek to explain which elements of society are (un)supportive of debt reduction policies, what rational or irrational factors motivate their decisions, and how stable these preferences are to manipulation by elites. The analysis centers around original and innovative multi-country survey experiments that elicit the character and stability of preferences for debt reduction. The project’s second phase uses these insights to connect the micro to the macro. By understanding which groups of citizens are motivated by which material factors or cognitive biases, we will develop new theories explaining how the distribution of these groups across countries, and their interaction with institutions, influence political decisions and ultimately affect the risk of sovereign debt crises.

The researchers in the two positions will focus on understanding how the preferences and behavior of citizens and creditors shape incentives for political action to either reduce or heighten the risk of a sovereign debt crisis.

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PhD Researchers in Political Economy at Leiden University