The seminar will discuss a few general aspects, topics and methodologies used in comparative political economy. Professor Vera Troeger will then discuss a specific project that analyses the impact of contractual maternity pay across higher education institutions on careers of academic mothers.
Vera Troeger is Professor of Quantitative Political Economy in the Department of Economics at Warwick University and CI of the Centre for Competitive Advantage in the Global Economy (CAGE). Between 2007 and 2011 she was Director of the Essex Summer School in Social Science Data Analysis. She previously held positions at the University of Essex, the Max Planck Institute of Economics and the University of Exeter. Vera is the founding editor-in-chief of the flagship journal of the European Political Science Association – Political Science Research and Methods, and served as associate editor for one of the most highly ranked journals in political science – Political Analysis and serves on the editorial boards of the American Political Science Review, European Journal of Political Research and the Journal of European Public Policy. She also was an executive council member of the Midwest Political Science Association and currently the European Political Science Association. Her research interests lie at the intersection between international and comparative political economy, labour economics, as well as applied quantitative data analysis and political methodology. In particular she studies the impact of parental leave policies on productivity, career development, and the gender pay gap as well as economic policy diffusion and spill-overs of monetary and tax policy. In addition, she contributes to the field of quantitative political methodology, especially pooled cross-section time series analysis, the trade-off between bias and efficiency in finite sample econometrics and endogeneity issues. She published papers on occupational maternity benefits and academic career paths, external effects of currency unions, monetary policy autonomy, international tax competition, time invariant and rarely changing variables in pooled data analysis, budgetary party politics, war and stock market reactions in the American Journal of Political Science, the European Journal for Political Research, the British Journal of Political Science, International Studies Quarterly, the Journal of Conflict Resolution, European Union Politics, Political Analysis, and the Journal of Public Policy.