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Micael Castanheira

Professor of economics at FNRS and ULB

(ECARES and SBS-EM - Solvay Brussels School of Economics and Management)

Welcome to my homepage

I am an economist, research director ("Directeur de Recherche") with the Fonds National de la Recherche Scientifique, and associate editor for the European Economic Review. Submit your paper here!

I work at ECARES: the European Centre for Advanced Research in Economics and Statistics, a research center of the Solvay Brussels School of Economics and Management, which is part of the Université Libre de Bruxelles (I know: this is a bit complicated, welcome to Belgium!).

I obtained my Ph.D. in economics from the Université Libre de Bruxelles, and spent two years as a post-doctoral fellow at IGIER (Bocconi University, Milan), and two years visiting NYU (September 2014 - January 2017). I am also a CEPR research affiliate.

My main research topics include the political economics of collective decisions, and of reforms. I also work on conflict and organization theory. My scientific works have been published in leading academic journals, such as Econometrica, American Journal of Political Science, Journal of the European Economic Association, Economic Journal, Journal of Public Economics, Games and Economic Behavior, International Economic Review, International Tax and Public Finance, and in several books.

I am also a member of the scientific board of the Belgian National Productivity Board. Previously, I sat on the scientific boards of the Price Observatory and of the National Bank of Belgium, as well as the board of Solvay Lifelong Learning, and I acted as an external expert a.o. for a multinational enterprise, the Bertelsmann Foundation, and the World Bank.

Recent activity

July 2025

New paper: Do Public Goods Actually Reduce Inequality?, joint with Giovanni Paolo Mariani and Clémence Tricaud

Public goods are meant to be universal, but they are inherently place-based. This paper systematically measures spatial access to public goods and quantifies the implications of distance to public facilities for income inequality. First, we map all schools and hospitals across Belgium. We compute the distance to facilities for each of the 20,000 neighborhoods and document large spatial inequalities in access to public facilities. Second, we find that this unequal distribution favors high-income neighborhoods: allocating public goods spending proportionally to our access index increases income inequality compared to measures based solely on disposable income. Third, we show that the positive relationship between income and access can be rationalized by a simple model of public goods allocation with an inequality-neutral social planner. Finally, we provide evidence that access is strongly correlated with educational and health outcomes, emphasizing the need to consider the place-based nature of public goods when measuring inequality.

October 2024

New version: Pack-Crack-Pack: Gerrymandering with Differential Turnout, with L. Bouton, G. Genicot, and A. Stashko
NBER Working Paper 31442 and CEPR Discussion Paper 18280
This paper studies the manipulation of electoral maps by political parties, commonly referred to as gerrymandering. At the core of our analysis is the recognition that not all inhabitants of a district vote. This is important for gerrymandering as districts must have the same population size, but only voters matter for electoral outcomes. We propose a model of gerrymandering that allows for heterogeneity in voter turnout across individuals. This model reveals a new strategy for the gerrymanderers: the pattern is to \textit{pack-crack-pack} along the turnout dimension. Specifically, parties benefit from packing low-turnout supporters and high-turnout opponents, while creating cracked districts that combine moderate-to-high-turnout supporters with lower-turnout opponents. These findings yield testable empirical implications about the relationship between partisan support, turnout rates, and electoral maps. Using a novel empirical strategy based on comparing maps proposed by Democrats and Republicans during the 2020 U.S. redistricting cycle, we test these predictions and find supporting evidence.

August 2024

Published: A Theory of Small Campaign Contributions, joint with Laurent Bouton and Allan Drazen , Economic Journal, 134(662), 2024, pp. 2351-90

Popular and academic discussions have mostly concentrated on large donors, even though small donors are a major source of financing for political campaigns. We propose a theory of small donors with a key novelty: it centers on the interactions between small donors and the parties' fund-raising strategy. In equilibrium, parties microtarget donors with a higher contribution potential (i.e., richer and with more intense preferences) and increase their total fundraising effort in close races. The parties' strategic fundraising amplifies the effect of income on contributions, and leads to closeness, underdog and bandwagon effects. We then study the welfare effects of a number of common campaign finance laws. We find that, due to equilibrium effects, those tools may produce outcomes opposite to intended objectives. Finally, we identify a tax-and-subsidy scheme that mutes the effect of income while still allowing donors to voice the intensity of their support.

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