For students:

Public Economics

  • What is the right level of tax progression?
  • What are the consequences of basic income?
  • How should universities be financed?
  • What is the right way to support poor people?
  • How should the pension system be financed?
Data visualization

Public economics provides a framework for thinking about the planner’s or the government’s intervention to the market. To this end, microeconomic models are used to assess how various market failures, inefficiencies, and inequalities can be corrected.

Much of modern public economics is related to inequality. The market economy does not necessarily produce a socially desirable distribution of income, and government intervention is again needed. Public economics research can inform policy discussion about the impacts of inequalities, how effective public policies are in reducing them, and how policymakers can address possible tradeoffs between economic efficiency and distributional equity.

At the core of public economic analysis are various policy measures, including taxes, provision of public goods, and regulatory actions. Research in contemporary public economics is increasingly empirical.  Impact evaluation methods and sufficient statistics approaches are used to attempt to credibly estimate the impact of policy instruments and reforms on taxpayer and individual behavior.

University of Helsinki and VATT Institute for Economic Research are part of the Finnish Centre of Excellence in Tax Systems Research, led by Professor Kaisa Kotakorpi of Tampere University.

Chair

  • Jukka Pirttilä

    Deputy Academic Director of Helsinki GSE, Professor @ University of Helsinki

Members

PhD Students

  • Ludvig Sinander

    University of Oxford

    Risk attitudes, dominance, and outside options (with Gregorio Curello and Mark Whitmeyer)

    • Microeconomics
    • Seminar

  • Satu Suonto

    University of Helsinki / VATT

    Determinants of Redistributive Preferences: Evidence from natural and survey experiment

    • Labor & Public Economics
    • PhD Seminar

  • Cloé Garnache

    Oslo Metropolitan University

    Are Asset Prices Sticky? (with Martin Schmalz and Dag Einar Sommervoll)

    • VATT
    • Seminar

  • Toomas Hinnosaar

    University of Nottingham

    Pricing Novel Goods

    • Microeconomics
    • Seminar

  • Petteri Palonen

    University of Helsinki

    Petteri Palonen will defend his thesis “Non-compliance and avoidance”

    • University of Helsinki
    • Doctoral Defence

  • Elisabet Viladecans-Marsal

    University of Barcelona

    When Developers Hold Office: Shaping Housing Supply Through Local Politics (with Ghizlen Ouasbaa & Albert Solé-Ollé)

    • Trade, Regional and Urban Economics
    • Seminar

  • Christopher Carpenter

    Vanderbilt

    The content of this event has not been announced yet. Please check back later.

    • Labor & Public Economics
    • Seminar

  • Hung Le

    Aalto University

    TBA

    • Industrial Organization
    • PhD Seminar

  • Ylva Moberg

    SOFI

    The content of this event has not been announced yet. Please check back later.

    • Labor & Public Economics
    • Seminar

  • Juho Koistinen

    University of Helsinki

    Juho Koistinen will defend his thesis “Essays in macroeconometrics under noninvertibility”

    • University of Helsinki
    • Doctoral Defence

  • Ritwik Banerjee

    Indian Institute of Management Bangalore

    Interpreting Intolerance (with Lata Gangadharan and Marie Claire Villeval)

    • Seminar

  • Albert Duodu

    Aalto University

    The content of this event has not been announced yet. Please check back later.

    • Environmental Economics
    • Seminar

  • Tushar Kundu

    Columbia University

    The content of this event has not been announced yet. Please check back later.

    • Economics of Education (Educa)
    • Seminar

  • Andreas Kleiner

    University of Bonn

    The content of this event has not been announced yet. Please check back later.

    • Microeconomics
    • Seminar

  • Rasmus Mellanen

    University of Helsinki

    The content of this event has not been announced yet. Please check back later.

    • Labor & Public Economics
    • PhD Seminar

  • Alejandro Zentner

    UT Dallas

    The content of this event has not been announced yet. Please check back later.

    • VATT
    • Seminar

  • Tuomas Kosonen

    VATT

    Optimization Errors in Taxes

    • Behavioral Economics
    • Seminar

  • Georgy Egorov

    Northwestern University

    The content of this event has not been announced yet. Please check back later.

    • Colloquium

  • Andrea Pozzi

    The content of this event has not been announced yet. Please check back later.

    • Industrial Organization
    • Seminar

  • Zach Y. Brown

    University of Michigan

    The content of this event has not been announced yet. Please check back later.

    • Colloquium

  • Eric Zwick

    University of Chicago Booth School of Business and NBER

    The content of this event has not been announced yet. Please check back later.

    • Labor & Public Economics
    • Seminar

  • Ben Goldman

    Cornell University

    The content of this event has not been announced yet. Please check back later.

    • Economics of Education (Educa)
    • Seminar