
Bruno HeyndelsVrije Universiteit Brussel | VUB
Bruno Heyndels
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Introduction
Skills and Expertise
Publications
Publications (92)
Polarization is increasingly seen as a phenomenon with far reaching and precarious consequences that extend beyond politics. Despite the extensive attention polarization has received, two crucial aspects of this phenomenon remain relatively understudied: electoral polarization and its socioeconomic drivers. We argue that socioeconomic anxieties—the...
Political selection is crucial for the functioning of democracy. However, the practice—in education and sports contexts—of artificially dividing school‐age children into different age groups leads to a considerable bias in this selection. The probability of becoming a (successful) politician depends on individuals' relative age. Being born shortly...
Female incumbents quit political life more readily than male incumbents (Lawless and Theriault in Legisl Stud Q 30:581–596, 2005; Vanlangenakker in Politics Gender 9:61–75, 2013). As experience is an important determinant of political success (Fiva and Røhr Eur Econ Rev 101:142–156, 2018) sex-differences in turnover rates contribute to a sex-relate...
Party leaders, acting as gatekeepers, have a direct impact on politicians’ careers. The fact that this leadership is often male has been identified as a source of discrimination against female candidates. We analyze such sex-biased party politics in formation of party lists. Recently, candidates’ list ranking in (semi-) open list systems has been s...
In semi-open list systems, parties present pre-selected pools of candidates to the electorate. Candidates’ assigned ranks on the lists heavily influence their election odds and may reflect party leaders’ preferences, notably a possible gender bias. To strengthen women's representation, parties’ choices are increasingly subject to legal quotas. Thes...
Some things we, economists, do not like. Maybe because we were taught to dislike them. Maybe because that is who we are. It seems like some things should be disliked. Political incorrectness may be one of these. We tend to dislike “should.” Among economists, gender quotas in politics tend not to be liked. The meritocratic critique is that competenc...
The sex gap in politics is widely documented: women tend to support left-wing parties more than men do. Evidence of this observation was recently supplemented by the identification of a within-party sex gap: within parties, female voters and politicians tend to take more left-wing positions. While this research typically limits itself to one policy...
Policy preferences have been shown to differ by sex within the electorate and among public officials. We explore whether—in a context of budgetary restraints—sex differences in budgetary preferences prevail among council members in Flemish municipalities. We find convincing evidence of sex-related differences. To fight a budget deficit, female poli...
Taxes and benefits create incentives for people to adopt or avoid certain behaviours. They create premiums for (socially) preferred states. A premium can be determined by either taxing unwanted behaviour or by subsidizing desired behaviour. The resulting economic incentive for changing one’s behaviour is nominally equivalent under both mechanisms....
Tax and benefit systems commonly assign premiums to (socially) preferable states. For instance, having a child usually warrants a (cost-reducing) premium compared to remaining childless. These premiums may equivalently be achieved as positive benefits for the preferable state, or as taxes for the non-preferred state. However, perceptions of fair tr...
Distinct policy options are typically characterised by a number of advantages (or ‘opportunities’) and disadvantages (or ‘threats’). The preference for one option over another depends on how individuals within an organisation perceive these opportunities and threats. In this article, we argue that individuals’ identification with an organisation’s...
Governments typically apply several tax instruments. The tax choice literature sees the choice among these as depending on the political costs involved. One source of such costs is (horizontal) inequity in the distribution of the tax burden. In this article, we provide the first empirical test of the question whether and to what extent such inequit...
Assume a community that needs politicians. They might not be desperately needed, just: needed. Now consider the type of politicians. You may want to select the most empathic ones, the most committed, the most funny, the best-looking, or just the most able. Before you claim that the latter option is by far—and self-evidently—superior, think twice. S...
The purpose of our study is to examine the effects from early-stage and late-stage R&D knowledge on pharma companies’ tendency to engage in collaborative drug development. Our study draws on the knowledge-based view of inter-firm collaborations, a theory that has refined the knowledge-based view of the firm by exploring the relationship between a f...
While most research on elite sport success focuses on sport policy factors or the explanatory powers of macro-level factors such as wealth and population, sporting success of countries is also determined by the competitive environment of a sport. This paper identified trends in competitive balance in athletics at world championships and Olympic Gam...
Government formation processes have attracted a substantial amount of scholarly attention. Yet, only few scholars try to explain the duration of government formations. This article extends the latter literature by examining the relation between the complexity of the bargaining environment and the duration of government formations at the local gover...
An examination of high-performance development studies reveals that a growing amount of research points to a divergence of elite sport policies among different sports or nations. At a sport-specific level, previous studies have identified crucial organisational resources within clubs, leagues or sports, but there is no method to evaluate countries’...
Political decision-making involves the presentation of policy options from opposing points of view and in different lights. We test whether economic policy decisions are subject to equivalency framing by presenting survey participants with binary risky-choice decisions in hypothetical policy scenarios. Potentially mediating influences of expertise...
We apply the theory of the knowledge-based view on the firm to investigate why pharmaceutical companies enter into inter-organizational collaborations during clinical drug development. A firm’s propensity to collaborate is influenced by the firm’s knowledge base, i.e. its stock of knowledge resources. We consider two knowledge bases that exist with...
Competition reduces rent extraction in private-sector firms. In this article, we empirically assess whether it similarly disciplines politicians by evaluating local-level governments’ performance in Flanders. The results indicate that electoral competition – measured via the number of parties competing in elections – significantly positively affect...
The success of a country’s elite sport success tends to be concentrated on specific sports or specific events. Additionally, as the predictive value of macro-level factors (e.g. population and GDP) for success decreases, the management of elite sport systems becomes more important. Even though multiple authors developed frameworks referring to comm...
For the first time, the determinants of a country's success at the Paralympic Games are studied, using data from four editions, starting in 1996. By means of a tobit panel, the authors find that gross domestic product (GDP) per capita, population, having many participants per million inhabitants, being a former communist country, hosting the Paraly...
Models of political decision making often assume that politicians are fully informed on voters' preferences. Still, while they may be privileged witnesses of the democratic process, real‐world politicians typically act upon imperfect information. Using a large scale survey among (498) Belgian local politicians we analyse whether and to what extent...
Sport – insbesondere der Hochleistungssport – ist ein Faszinosum, das als Plattform für gesellschaftliche Anliegen genutzt wird. Hierauf gründen die unterschiedlichen Interessen am aktiven und passiven Sport und das staatliche Interesse am Spitzensport. In den meisten Ländern ist der Spitzensport nationales Anliegen: So bilden Staaten in nationalen...
In Belgium property taxes are based on the assessed rental value of a property. This value, the so-called cadastral revenue, is entrenched - but not undisputed - in our tax policy. Due to the rigid and outdated character of this tax base, a growing sense of unfairness surrounds the derived property tax (oov). This paper uncovers the relationship be...
This study examines whether a process of internationalization has affected the level of athletic performance amongst high-level athletes competing on the world stage. Top 100 International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF) rankings were compared at two time points: 1984 and 2006, by event and by gender. We identified internationalization...
In the debate about the electoral appeal of Green parties, some authors argue that Green voting is a phenomenon typical of the ‘new middle class’ (young, highly educated and urban), while others assume that Green parties are able to reach out to new constituencies. Aggregate level data on the electoral performance of Belgian Green parties in the pe...
This paper analyses the effect of literary prizes and nominations on the subsequent market success using a panel dataset of
Dutch-language titles from January 2003 to June 2005. The analysis indicates winning a prize generally has a positive effect
on the ensuing sales, whereas nominations do not generate additional sales. The precise effect differ...
Social capital has been shown to positively influence government performance. Boix and Posner (Br. J. Polit. Sci. 28:686–693,
1998) suggest a possible explanation: social capital makes citizens monitor the government more closely. Such monitoring will
be more explicit to the extent that instrumental voting motivations outweigh expressive considerat...
In this paper we study the labour supply of professional tennis players. We examine the entry decisions of the top ten players of the 2007 ATP (Association of Tennis Professionals1.
Association of Tennis Professionals 2007 . Official ATP Rulebook 2007 , Retrieved 10 January 2008 from www.atptennis.com . View all references) ranking for the three mo...
The achievement of international and especially Olympic sporting success is increasingly important to a growing number of countries. It is however not clear how success is defined and can be measured. The number of medals won in Olympics Games and other international sport competitions offers the most self-evident and transparent measure of success...
Using a structure-conduct-performance model, we analyse competitive balance in the male (Association of Tennis Professionals or ATP) and female (Women Tennis Association or WTA) professional tennis circuits. Measures of inter-seasonal uncertainty as well as indicators for long-term uncertainty suggest that men's tennis is more competitive. From yea...
We analyse programmatic choices of Flemish theatres and examine how they are affected by the theatres' budgetary situation. Following Lancaster's characteristics approach, we identify several output characteristics of individual Flemish theatres during the period 1980 to 2000. A simultaneous equation approach is used to capture the theatre managers...
Governments often see it as their responsibility to support cultural life and at times spend a significant amount of resources in the pursuit of this goal. The present paper analyses whether and how municipalities influence each other in this decision to spend resources on the arts (using data on local government cultural spending in 304 Flemish mu...
This article analyzes how age grouping in youth competitions and soccer education programs affects wage formation at the professional level. A simple theoretical model shows that professional players born late after the cutoff date are expected to earn systematically higher wages than their early-born peers. Two discriminating factors are responsib...
The Vlaams Blok is one of the most successful extreme right-wing parties in Europe. We empirically identify contextual determinants that contribute to its political success in the municipal elections of October 8th, 2000 in Flanders. The use of the Tobit II estimator allows disentangling the party's decision to participate in an election and its (l...
Theatre experts generally agree that the Flemish theatre has flourished artistically over the period 1980–2000. Attendance, on the other hand, has declined significantly. Following Lancaster’s characteristics approach, we identify several output characteristics of individual theatre productions. Using a panel of 59 Flemish theatres, we examine the...
Using entries in the 2005 IAAF rankings as a measure of a country’s success in athletics, we analyse intercountry differences in athletic specialisation (measured through an index for revealed symmetric comparative advantage). A Tobit II model identifies macro-economic, sociological and political conditions that shape patterns of specialisation. We...
We analyse the presence of a cost of ruling and/or incumbency advantage in the municipal elections in Flanders of 1988, 1994 and 2000. The empirical work concentrates on vote share evolutions of the three main parties: CD&V, Sp.a and VLD. We find evidence that being in power leads to an incumbency advantage, especially for those parties who provide...
Recent theoretical arguments hold that the institutional setting of a political system influences coalition formation. Empirical analyses that confront these hypotheses have, however, been slow to emerge. We provide a first test of the relation between coalition formation and one element within this institutional setting: the existence of commitm...
The setting of new taxes is a notably visible act that has potential political costs. This paper explores the setting of new environmental taxes across the 308 Flemish municipalities over the period 1991–1999. We find that first adoptions of a green tax are much less likely to occur during election years but are more likely if ones' peers/neighbour...
Recent theoretical papers develop political agency models in which voters compare tax policy with that in neighbouring jurisdictions. In these yardstick competition models voters judge incumbents by comparing their policy with policy in neighbouring jurisdictions. This paper reports an analysis of municipal elections in Flanders during the period 1...
Political fragmentation has been shown to be an important determinant of electoral turnout. We introduce an empirical approach that allows disentangling the impact of two dimensions of such fragmentation: the number of parties and the size inequalities between those parties. This is important as it allows us to assess the size, significance, and di...
Under instrumental voting closer elections are expected to have higher turnout. Under expressive voting, however, turnout may increase with decreasing closeness when voters have a preference for winners. An empirical test using data on Belgian municipal elections supports this. We find that turnout reaches a local maximum when the largest party in...
The argument has recently been made that political competition may have a similarly virtuous effect on economic performance as market competition. The present paper provides a further empirical assessment of this proposition by looking at local level governments in Flanders. The results indicate that political competition at elections does have a b...
Using a panel of budgetary data over the period 1989–1996, we analyse how political fragmentation of Flemish local governments affects their reactions in the context of a major reform of the grant system. This reform reallocated grants among municipalities and thus unavoidably created “winners” and “losers”. Thus, it is possible to distinguish betw...
The Weak Government Hypothesis states that government fragmentation leads to higher public deficits and debt. This relation can be explained by government inaction, common pool problems or the strategic use of debt that arise in coalition governments. Importantly, whereas government inaction models concentrate on the short-term effects of governmen...
The layout of the ballot affects voting behaviour. Candidates in critical (top and bottom) positions in multi-column ballots obtain a larger percentage of the vote in multi-column ballots than in a single-column ballot. In the present paper, we analyse whether the socio-economic characteristics of the electorate affect the prominence of such Ball...
Analysing data for the 1995 Regional Elections in Brussels we show how the layout of the ballot affects voting behaviour as reflected by the candidates' preferential votes. We discuss how this special case of Ballot Position Effects can be reconciled with existing models of (expressive) voting. Copyright 2003 by Kluwer Academic Publishers
In a federal context, policies have informational value for both the voters and politicians in other jurisdictions. In the presence of self-serving biases in the perceptions of the political agents, diversity of policies may have detrimental effects. Self-serving biases can make it more difficult to reach agreements between parties. This, in turn m...
We analyse whether the psychological pricing in the private sector has a public sector counterpart in tax policy. Analysing the main theoretical arguments for the existence of price points, and applying them to the public sector, suggests that psychological taxing reveals itself by the use of non-0 ending tax rates. The tax rate endings of the loca...
Using a panel of 308 observations over the period 1989–1996, we analyse how Flemish municipalities react to budgetary shocks. We address two questions: whether governments respond differently to tax than to grant windfalls and whether responses to positive and negative shocks are symmetric. Our results confirm the recent findings on U.S. local gove...
Redistribution is typically viewed to be a task of central governments. Still, many local governments do have some discretion in redistribution policy. The main theoretical argument is that redistribution may be a local public good. Using data on Flemish municipalities, we present an empirical test of Pauly's assumption. We find that the willingnes...
This paper analyses whether and to what extent politicians manipulate tax structures strategically in order to win elections or for ideological purposes. We introduce an indicator for tax structure turbulence which measures the degree to which a country's tax structure changes from one year to another. Using data on 18 OECD countries over the perio...
Recent empirical work on US governments indicates an asymmetry in the flypaper effect: the elasticity of public spending with respect to changes in grants differs significantly for positive and negative changes. Using a panel of data on Flemish municipalities covering the period 1989-96, we also find clear evidence of asymmetrical reactions. More p...
This paper considers how tax structures in OECD countries change over time and how these changes are related to political fragmentation. Tax structures amongst OECD countries have become more uniform in the recent past (1965–1995) but it is less clear that this convergence satisfies time-series requirements. Evidence on stochastic convergence tends...
The Queen Elisabeth Contest is one of the most prestigious competitions in classical music. For both the artists who participate and for the public, it is important that the ranking of the finalists be affected as little as possible by exogenous factors relating to the organisation of the competition. Still, it is impossible to control for all cont...
This paper examines politicians' stated preferences on tax reforms which aim to bring about a given change in revenue. The paper starts from a simple framework in which politicians are vote maximisers, analyses how disequilibria may affect tax choices and considers possible asymmetries in decisions. The empirical examination of the problem uses the...
This paper investigates how politicians define the level of the tax burden in their jurisdiction in terms of a scale from low to high. This definition is driven by evaluative components in politicians’ tax burden schema. These components are, in part, affective and, in part, a confrontation of affect and cognition. Assuming that politicians have an...
To cover their expenditures, governments dispose of an almost infinite number of different taxes. Actual tax choices depend on economic, political and sociological constraints imposed on government. National differences in these constraints explain why considerable tax structure heterogeneity exists (section 2). Still, a prominent characteristic of...
Abstract - Recent empirical studies show,that U.S. states’ and,local govern- ments’ tax policy is copied among neighboring,jurisdictions. We present empirical evidence,on such tax mimick- ing among,Belgian municipalities. Belgian data offer important,advan- tages. The (589) municipalities operate within an institutionally homogeneous setting. Moreo...
Flemish municipalities collect revenue from different sources. The mental accounting framework suggests that the source of revenue affects the manner in which it is spent. We present an empirical test of this. Using a panel of 308 observations over the period 1989-1996 we analyze the responses of Flemish municipalities non-debt expenditures to chan...
This paper investigates politicians' opinions about the level of local tax rates. Politicians are assumed to have the objective of maximising expected votes. Their opinions regarding the level of tax rates reflect their beliefs about the political cost (expected loss in votes) associated with the tax rate, and also their attitudes towards taxation...
Existing theoretical evidence on optimal currency spacing is fragmentary and, to some extent, contradictory. This note brings together the pieces and tries to solve the puzzle. It shows that if the spacing of denominations is uniform, then the average number of notes and coins exchanged in a transaction can be minimized by spacing denominations apa...
By using the Hirschman-Herfindahl index (HHC) the traditional approach to the tax complexity hypothesis introduces a restriction into the fiscal illusion model which has no theoretical foundation. We analyse the existing framework of the tax complexity hypothesis in detail and propose to capture this complexity through a Hannah and Kay index. We ex...
Fiscal illusion refers to a systematically biased perception of fiscal parameters, due to demand-side error/ignorance or supply-side abusive behaviour. As such it is a component of a more general tax choice framework.
This paper focuses predominantly on the empirical estimation of the four major sources of fiscal illusion, namely the flypaper effec...
Belgian municipalities rely heavily on surcharges on national income taxes as a source of income. In a context offederal government, such taxes create "fiscal externalities": decisions at one level of government affect the welfare at other levels. We focus on one such interdependency: EC-civil servants are not subject to national incame taxation. W...
Tax policy is one of the important policy domains of government and therefore an important issue for voters. The literature shows that taxation can have an electoral cost. However, several factors influence this electoral impact. The nature of the tax itself, tax policy in neighbouring jurisdictions and the political characteristics of the governme...
Abstract Abstract Abstract In this research we investigate the impact of social capital on political involvement of Flemish citizens. Social capital is treated as a multidimensional concept that contains both structural and attitudinal components. Political involvement is measured by four different indicators: (I) political participation, (II) poli...