Thushyanthan Baskaran

Newcomer Party Recruitment in Germany

During his stay at CESifo, Thushyanthan Baskaran will mainly work on projects related to the political economy of local politics and fiscal policy. He will explore how newcomer parties in Germany select their grassroots candidates and the effect of different recruitment strategies on policy choices. This project complements his recent research agenda on political selection, in which he explores the causes and consequences of politicians’ identity and characteristics in different institutional settings. In previous projects within this research agenda, he has, for example, explored how the gender of local council members affects the provision of public child care using candidate-level data on local council members in Bavaria and a RD strategy centered around close races for the last seat won by a party.

Mr. Baskaran's current research focuses on public economics, regional economics and development economics, covering topics such as fiscal capacity, political budget cycles, political selection, and economic development.

Thushyanthan Baskaran is a Professor of Economics at the Ruhr University Bochum. He has studied Economics at the Free University of Berlin and received his PhD in Economics from the University of Heidelberg. He was previously a Postdoctoral Researcher at the University of Gothenburg, an Assistant Professor for Public Finance at the University of Göttingen, and a Professor for Applied Microeconomics at the University of Siegen. He is also a ZEW Research Associate. His work has been published in journals such as the American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, the Journal of Public Economics and the Journal of Urban Economics. Mr. Baskaran is a CESifo Research Network Fellow.