Research

IPE scholars often view financial liberalization as a uniform process, assuming that once a country opens its financial sector, it does so broadly and equally for all foreign partners, both in theory and practice. However, this perspective overlooks a crucial reality: financial openness is far more selective. What drives this selectivity? I argue that cultural identity factors—specifically cultural distance and internal diversity—play a key role in shaping financial relationships between countries. Using country-level panel data, I present empirical evidence showing that cultural distance acts as a barrier to deeper financial integration, while internal cultural diversity is linked to more open financial policies. This research challenges the notion that financial liberalization follows a ‘one-size-fits-all’ model, offering a new perspective on the selective nature of global financial engagement. The findings help explain why some international financial partnerships flourish while others falter, despite formal cooperation. Recognizing this selectivity encourages more realistic expectations about financial openness and promotes the development of cooperation frameworks that better reflect the complexities of global economic relationships.

What drives individuals to engage financially with certain foreign entities while avoiding others? This paper examines the role of cultural identity in financial decision-making on a global scale, with cues of cultural similarity or difference triggering cognitive biases toward in-group favoritism. Through a pre-registered behavioral experiment with a nationally representative U.S. sample, I investigate how cultural proximity and diversity affect individuals' willingness to engage financially with foreign entities across varying degrees of perceived ‘out-group’ status—and how these interactions influence preferences regarding foreign economic presence in the local market. Findings reveal that in-group favoritism strongly shapes financial behavior and attitudes, leading to biases that can undermine democratic values, social cohesion, and human capital. By uncovering the roots of cooperation—and barriers to it—this study sheds light on essential dynamics that affect both domestic society and international relations.

Could political rivalry in a setting of high affective polarization manifest in a willingness to curtail social rights from political opponents? This study explores whether political rivalry in a polarized era biases perceptions of welfare deservingness, typically guided by political ideology and the degree to which welfare recipients are motivated to seek employment. Using the Israeli 2023 judicial reform crisis as a case study, we conducted a pre-registered experiment, manipulating the motivation and implicit political affiliations of hypothetical welfare recipients. We find that while motivated recipients are generally seen as more deserving, political biases significantly distort these evaluations. Out-group recipients are viewed as less deserving than in-group members. Additionally, absent political cues, motivation bears a higher reward for recipients as compared to both in- and out-group motivated recipients. The study reveals the societal risks of escalating political divisions, including the denial of social rights of political out-group members.

Does exposure to conflict displacement amplify support for far-right parties? This study investigates the political impact of October the Seventh, focusing on conflict-induced displacement. Utilizing a pre-registered survey and Regression Discontinuity Design (RDD) analysis, I examine a natural experiment in Israel, where government-ordered evacuations due to military conflicts offer a unique opportunity to assess the causal effects of displacement on political outcomes. By analyzing changes in retrospective and prospective voting, as well as in political ideology, this research provides robust evidence on how security-driven displacement influences support for far-right parties. It addresses gaps in theories of democratic governance and retrospective voting by highlighting the role of security threats and displacement in shaping populist movements. The findings offer valuable insights for policymakers to address the concerns driving support for far-right parties and promote a more stable political discourse.

The 2010-12 European banking crisis triggered severe recessions, job losses, and austerity measures. In response, member states delegated some bank-supervision authority to the European Union (EU). We argue that this delegation enables governments to shift blame for bank failures to the EU. This blame-shifting strategy shapes public opinion, altering perceptions of who is accountable for economic failures. Using a conjoint survey experiment with 1,724 participants in Germany, a least likely country for our argument, we find that a hypothetical taxpayer-funded bailout reduces support for governing parties by 18 percent on average when national authorities are mainly responsible for bank-supervision, but this effect disappears when the EU assumes a dominant role. This effect exists across the gender, regional, socio-economic, education, and left-right divides, across varying levels of exposure to banks, and regardless of whether people know that the German bank regulator (Bafin) is independent from the government. However, the blame avoidance effect is especially pronounced in people who are young, live in poor Länder, are university graduates, do not trust national institutions, or have pro-EU views. EU-level bank-supervision failure actually increases public support for non-government Eurosceptic parties, but is detrimental for left-wing or Eurosceptic governments, especially extreme ones. Thus, this study helps explore key patterns of public support for governments that delegate policies to the EU, and by implication support for delegation itself, across geographical spaces and social groups. This is also a study of the implications, in terms of public support for delegation, of IO-related outcomes such as bank- supervisions.

There is ample literature on drivers of electoral success of Eurosceptic parties, but less on the electoral rewards for their performance in office. Eurosceptic parties, typically populist but not necessarily radical right, operate within the European Union (EU)’s highly developed multi-level governance structure, which blunts their agenda more than other international organizations do. We lack a theory about how voters respond to the record of Eurosceptic governments. We argue that when European integration accelerates, support for Eurosceptic government parties falls even if support for Eurosceptic parties outside government increases, and that fiscal allocations from the EU counterintuitively further reduce support for incumbent Eurosceptic parties. We demonstrate our arguments using observational data on all parties and national elections in all of the EU member states from 1979 to 2018 and test our hypotheses with a conjoint survey experimental design.

According to the literature, the IMF’s track-record in averting financial crises and promoting economic growth is mixed, and evidence suggests that IMF programs may increase poverty and income inequality, and have adverse and even gendered effects on unemployment, labour income and rights. IMF programs are also linked to deteriorating public health, educational outcomes, vaccination rates, child mortality, corruption, government instability and the likelihood of civil war. We replicate results from 508 models in 29 related articles in top journals (all such articles for which we could obtain replication files), and find that many of them effectively base their conclusions on a small set of countries or years, even when their nominal samples are large. To calculate this we develop indicators of the size of effective samples, which tell us if a particular estimate is based on the entire data fed into the regression, or rather on an effectively narrower subset of observations. A small effective sample hinders the ability to generalize the results to the entire nominal sample (low internal validity), and possibly also to a target population (low external validity) especially if the sample is representative of the population. These indicators, which are comparable across models and datasets, can be applied to a range of regression analyses and methods. We use these indicators to also demonstrate how scholars trade-off meticulousness (in both treatment operationalization and in causal identification) against generalizability. Our indicators can help scholars manage and optimize this trade-off.