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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 Price Observatory of the Belgian government and of the National Bank of Belgium, and I acted as an external expert a.o. for a multinational enterprise, the Bertelsmann Foundation, and the World Bank.

Recent activity

February 2024

Accepted: A Theory of Small Campaign Contributions, joint with Laurent Bouton and Allan Drazen , Economic Journal.

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.

December 2023

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, known as \textit{gerrymandering}. At the core of our analysis is the recognition that 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 turnout rates across individuals. We show how this modifies the gerrymandering strategies: the novel pattern is to pack-crack-pack along the turnout dimension. That is, parties benefit from packing their supporters when they have too low turnout rate as well as their opponents when they have too high turnout rate. In between, they create cracked districts that mix moderate-to-high-turnout supporters with lower-turnout opponents.
This produces testable empirical implications about the link between partisan support, turnout rates, and electoral maps. Using a novel empirical strategy that relies on the comparison of maps proposed by Democrats and Republicans during the 2020 redistricting cycle in the US, we bring such empirical implications to the data and find support for them.