In Government We Trust: The Role of Fiscal Decentralization

We measure the contribution of fiscal decentralization to trust in government. Using repeated cross-country survey data of individuals on several measures of trust in govern- ment over the 1994-2007 period, we estimate an ordered response model of the government trust and fiscal decentralization nexus. We control for unobserved country characteristics, macroeconomic determinants, and individual characteristics. Our main finding is that fiscal decentralization increases trust in government. More specifically, a one percentage point increase in fiscal decentralization causes roughly a four-fifths of a percentage point increase in government trust. The beneficial effect of fiscal decentralization on trust in government is neither limited to nor necessarily large for relatively decentralized countries.Fiscal Decentralization;Government Trust;Social Capital

Tackling Environmental Threats with Grassroots Citizen Science

Air pollution, climate change, disease outbreaks and other threats have spurred a new form of public engagement with science and technology called environmental grassroots citizen science. Contrary to expert-led citizen science projects in which citizens collect scientific data for experts, these grassroots initiatives emanate from the bottom up, with citizens developing their own measurement tools and generating their own data, distinct from official institutional approaches. Environmental grassroots citizen science is markedly on the rise in Europe, where citizens demand policy action against air, traffic, and related forms of pollution. By taking science and technology into their own hands, citizens increase pressure on public authorities and scientists to ‘open up’ scientific research and environmental policymaking to society. Policymakers, scientists, businesses and other stakeholders are taking notice. Some experts express a willingness to work with these citizen scientists, while others raise concerns about the scientific quality of the data produced by citizens and the value these data have to those who set science policy, as most citizens lack formal scientific training. Grassroots citizen scientists in turn voice criticism of institutional science and its links with industry and government, arguing that such connections inhibit knowledge sharing and the development of a true participatory science culture. How then should we imagine environmental governance? What (if any) is the role of grassroots citizen science in this process? And how should governments and experts respond to citizen scientists and their demands? This research project seeks to develop answers to these questions in consultation with all concerned parties.This includes your. Your thoughts and suggestions will be shared with citizen scientists, decision makers, professional researchers, and others in a coordinated effort to identify and address the challenges and pitfalls of environmental governance

Fiscal Policy Reforms and Dynamic Laffer Effects

We examine the impact of fiscal policy reforms on the long-run government budget balance in a one-sector model of endogenous growth with factor income taxes, a tax on consumption, non-productive public goods expenditures, and a labour-leisure trade-off. In addition, we allow for different structures of government expenditures and public debt. We analytically show that, when performing a dynamic Laffer effect analysis, there exists a set of conditions that hold for a number of endogenous growth models. We find that for the euro area an improvement in the long-run government budget balance is always obtained for a lower tax rate on capital income but is only obtained for a substantial lower tax rate on labour income. Moreover, we show that when lower taxes on factor income are financed by higher taxes on consumption, there exists a wide array of combinations for which there is an improvement in both the long-run government budget balance and lifetime welfare. These combinations, however, differ in their implications for labour supply and immediate welfare effects.

Dynamic Scoring Through Creative Destruction

Abstract: We examine the dynamic feedback effects of fiscal policies on the government budget and economy activity in a calibrated general equilibrium framework featuring endogenous growth through creative destruction. For several European countries, we find that making tax incentives with respect to research effort more generous is the least costly way, in terms of the impact on the government budget, to promote economic growth. It is almost three times as cost effective as lowering the tax rate on capital income. When non-distorting financing options are excluded, adjusting the consumption tax to finance more generous tax incentives for research effort leads to the smallest loss in economic efficiency and the largest welfare gain

Fukushima Travels

This poster is inspired by my recent research work on the 2011 Fukushima disaster. It depicts how ‘Fukushima’ has registered in narratives, pictures, and images in my home country of Belgium, evoking hope, despair, anger, and awe. Fukushima travels a complicated route, and is transformed and repackaged in various ways. Alongside the dominant, mediatized narratives of expert reasoning (‘Here are the facts’) and fear (‘It could happen here’), we encounter denial and technological solutionism (‘Important milestone in Fukushima cleanup’), as well as aspirations of transformation and renewal. The latter include experiments in citizen science, with citizens in Japan and elsewhere generating their own scientific data and tools, and seeking to open research and science policymaking to the wider public. As a social scientist who collaborates with nuclear scientists and technologists and who informs policymakers, I am drawn to these new starting points and to how travels between Japan and Europe can generate new fields of possibility for stakeholders interested in civic engagement, mutual learning, and democratic renewal. While inevitably partial and unfinished, my impressions are meant to be generative, bringing complex practical and speculative considerations into the picture so that others could get an idea of what is at stake in citizen science after Fukushima, for individuals and broader communities. I invite others to think through these issues with me and to confess to the difficulties of transforming (nuclear) science-society governance towards robust and responsible processes and outcomes

Compression of sub-relativistic space-charge-dominated electron bunches for single-shot femtosecond electron diffraction

We demonstrate compression of 95 keV, space-charge-dominated electron bunches to sub-100 fs durations. These bunches have sufficient charge (200 fC) and are of sufficient quality to capture a diffraction pattern with a single shot, which we demonstrate by a diffraction experiment on a polycrystalline gold foil. Compression is realized by means of velocity bunching as a result of a velocity chirp, induced by the oscillatory longitudinal electric field of a 3 GHz radio-frequency cavity. The arrival time jitter is measured to be 80 fs