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
CRETA Seminar - Catherine Bobtcheff
Catherine will present a paper co-authored with David Alary (Toulouse School of Economics) and Carole Haritchabalet (Université de Pau) entitled “Organizing insurance supply for new and undiversifiable risks”.
The abstract is the following: “This paper explores how insurance companies can coordinate to extend their joint capacity for the coverage of new and undiversifiable risks. The undiversifiable nature of such risks causes a shortage of insurance capacity and their limited knowledge makes learning and information sharing necessary. In practice, organizing such insurance supply amounts to sharing a common value divisible good between capacity constrained and privately informed insurers with a reserve price. Widely used ad-hoc co-insurance agreements out to operate as a uniform price auction with an ``exit/re-entry'' option. We compare it to a discriminatory auction, another auction present in the insurance industry. Both auction formats lead to different coverage/premium tradeoffs. If at least one insurer provides an optimistic expertise about the risk, ad-hoc co-insurance agreements offer higher coverage. This result is reversed when all insurers are pessimistic about the risk. Static comparative results with respect to the severity of the capacity constraints and the reserve price are provided. In the case of completely new risks, a regulator aiming at maximizing the expected coverage should promote ad-hoc co-insurance agreements when the reserve price is low enough or when capacity constraints are large enough.”