Moritz Kuhn discussion of: Fiscal capacity support

The paper addresses the important and pressing question on the design of fiscal policy programmes at the European level. Several recent crises such as the global financial crisis, the sovereign debt crisis or the Covid crisis have raised the question as to whether there are potential benefits of having European fiscal policies to stabilize any asymmetric impact of crises across Europe. Yet, there is sometimes strong resistance by national policymakers for such European fiscal policy programmes because of the expectation that they will lack support among national electorates, particularly if the policies involve cross-country redistribution. A systematic evaluation of the support for European policy proposals is still missing so that the question of which policies, if any, would find support is still an open and important one to explore. Answers to this question will help to understand what policy proposals, if any, will find support of the national electorate in different countries and the research results will therefore be able to guide European policymaking in the future. The current paper addresses this question with a targeted survey that goes one step further and aims at eliciting the support for entire policy proposals and their individual components. The authors show survey respondents comprehensive policy proposals in which the authors then experimentally vary single dimensions of the proposals to elicit the support and valuation of different aspects of the entire policy proposal.

Moritz Kuhn discussion of: Safe choices?

The Covid pandemic dominated social life over the past 2 years. It turned social interaction that is a key part of human life into risky behaviour. It thereby affected the relative utility from different consumption goods compared with a non-pandemic world. Those consumption goods that happen in public or in groups (watching a soccer game at the stadium) come in the pandemic with the risk of infection, whereas others that are done at home (watching a soccer game on TV) remain unaffected. As a result, households face a new trade-off for their consumption decisions when they have to decide about consumption with social interaction and the risk of infection. Many governments put regulation in place that restricted this trade off, whereas other governments asked the population to be responsible enough to decide on this risk-return trade off solely based on private costs and gains.