Political Economy and Public Economics
Political Economy and Public Economics
The Department of Economics at the University of Warwick has an active Political Economy and Public Economics (PEPE) Research Group. These two disciplines have natural complementarities. Political Economy focuses more on the political feasibility of certain policies by looking at which policies are more likely to enjoy public support and thus succeed in an electoral contest. Public economics looks more at determining which policies are optimal in every environment, but is less concerned about their political approval or feasibility.
Recent world events such as the public backlash against globalization and inequality have raised awareness for the need for more integration between these two approaches as political resistance to the adoption of potentially beneficial policies has become ever more salient. Hence by their very nature these two disciplines transcend traditional field divisions such as micro and macroeconomics: they use theoretical, empirical and experimental methods to obtain conclusions, thus generating synergies with various other groups in our department from development to experimental to history to macroeconomics to economic theory.
Our activities
PEPE Research Group Seminar
Thursday: 11.15am-12.30pm
A weekly seminar is organised that brings top economists and political scientist speakers every week for a double-feature seminar in coordination with the LSE.
For a detailed scheduled of speakers please follow the link below:
https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/economics/seminars/seminars/political-economy
Organisers: Michela Redoano and Mateusz Stalinski
PEPE Research Group Annual Conference
In collaboration with colleagues from Princeton and Yale, and with the support of CEPR, the PEPE Research Group organises an annual conference which has become a central meeting of political economists in Europe. Having taken place in previous years in Venice and Rome, it attracts over 70 delegates attending from leading institutions in the US, EU and the UK. Every year, several of our PhD students get to participate in a fully funded conference with an opportunity to engage with leading scholars.
Find out more about this year's conference which will take place 26-27 April 2024 in Rome.
Organisers: Helios Herrera, Mateusz Stalinski
People
Academics
Academics associated with the PEPE Research Group are:
Research Students
Events
PEPE Seminar - Lena Song (UIUC)
Title: Making Public Law: Artificial Intelligence for Legal Accessibility and Judicial Legitimacy (joint with Elliott Ash, Aniket Kesari, Suresh Naidu, and Dominik Stammbach)
Abstract: Laws have increasingly become difficult for the public to understand due to their complexity and the decline in trusted legal journalism. We build a novel AI-powered legal summarizer to produce easy-to-read summaries of the reasoning in judicial opinions. We study the effects of these summaries in three related experiments. First, we show in a survey experiment that, compared to existing expert-written summaries, AI-generated simple summaries of U.S. Supreme Court judicial opinions are more accessible to the public and more easily understood by non-experts. They help respondents understand the key features of a ruling, and have higher perceived quality, especially for respondents with less formal education. Second, we study how these summaries affect policy attitudes and institutional legitimacy in a large-scale survey experiment around the release of the affirmative action decision in June 2023. While the summaries enhance understanding of judicial opinions across issues, they have mixed effects on the acceptance of court decisions. Finally, we explore the effect of these summaries on public discourse in a social media experiment.