Prof. Dr. Nicola Fuchs-Schündeln

The scientific focus of the professorship “Macroeconomics and Development” lies in particular on the investigation of the malleability and formation of economic and political preferences, as well as on the analysis of the global labor supply behavior of households.

In economics, preferences are generally assumed to be exogenous. The cluster professorship, on the other hand, investigates whether and how life under certain economic or political systems influences individual preferences. The malleability of individual preferences can be seen as an important factor in the formation of normative orders. In addition, the professorship is dedicated to the analysis of labor supply behavior worldwide and draws conclusions from the results for welfare differences between poor and rich countries. These in turn influence the emergence of normative orders, while work behavior itself is at least partially influenced by normative orders (especially for women).

Two major research topics were investigated at the professorship. On the one hand, the formation of economic and political preferences; on the other, the labor supply behavior of households. In the first area, the question of whether support for a political system increases the longer individuals live under this system was investigated using the example of support for democracy. The second area on the labor supply of households is covered by various research projects of the professorship. The main question is to document international differences in the labor supply behavior of households, as well as to analyze their emergence and their effects on welfare measurements.

In the first area, it could be shown that individual support for democracy does indeed increase with the time someone has spent in a democratic regime, regardless of the quality of the regime and other factors. Political preferences are thus endogenous and are influenced by individual experience with the regime.

In the second area, a large-scale study has shown that average working hours are substantially higher in low-income countries than in average high-income countries, which means that labor productivity and welfare differences are higher than suggested by a comparison of per capita purchasing power. We also find that the labor supply behavior of married women in Europe and the US is significantly influenced by the tax system.

The most important publications of this professorship of the Cluster of Excellence:

Fuchs-Schündeln, Nicola & Alexander Blick: “Quantifying the Disincentive Effects of Joint Taxation on Married Women’s Labor Supply”, in: American Economic Review Papers & Proceedings, forthcoming, May 2017.
Fuchs-Schündeln, Nicola & Tarek Hassan: “Natural Experiments in Macroeconomics”, in: Taylor, John B. and Harald Uhlig (eds.): Handbook of Macroeconomics, Elsevier, Vol. 2a, 2016, pp. 923-1012.
Fuchs-Schündeln, Nicola & Paolo Masella: “Long-Lasting Effects of Socialist Education”, in: Review of Economics and Statistics, 98(3), 2016, pp. 428-441.
Fuchs-Schündeln, Nicola & Matthias Schündeln: “On the Endogeneity of Political Preferences: Evidence from Individual Experience with Democracy”, in: Science,347(6226), 2015, pp. 1145-1148.
Fuchs-Schündeln, Nicola & Kevin Bartz: “The Role of Borders, Languages, and Currencies as Obstacles to Labor Market Integration”, in: European Economic Review, 56(6), 2012, pp. 1148-1163.