Past Events
Past Events 14. CompNet Annual Conference (Vilnius, 25-26 September 2025) The 14th CompNet Annual Conference, co-hosted with the Bank of Lithuania, took place on 25–26 September…
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ProdTalks
CompNet ProdTalks CompNet ProdTalks is a monthly recurring 1.5 hour virtual event, two selected papers will be presented including presentation, discussion and Q&A. The top ic…
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10th CompNet Annual Conference
10th CompNet Annual Conference This year CompNet celebrates its 10th Annual Conference, together with Banque de France as co-host, which took place in Paris. The topic of the…
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Conference on innovation and productivity in the aftermath of the pandemic
Conference on innovation and productivity in the aftermath of the pandemic Asian Development Bank Institute, Tokyo-Japan 15. November 2022 In the last few years, the ADBI has…
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Virtual Conference on Sustainable development, firm performance and competitiveness policies in small open economies
Virtual Conference on Sustainable development, firm performance and competitiveness policies in small open economies This Conference has been jointly organised by CompNet and…
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8th CompNet Annual Conference
From Micro to Macro: Market Power, Firms’ Heterogeneity and Investment 8th Annual Conference of CompNet, jointly organized with IMF, EIB, ENRI and IWH, March 18-19 2019, European…
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1st CompNet Data User Conference
1st CompNet Data User Conference Since it is well established among researchers of productivity and competitiveness that macro data cannot answer all questions emerging in today's…
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4th and 5th vintage
4th and 5th Vintage CompNet Dataset In 2015-2016 The Competitiveness Research Network released to the public respectively the 4th & 5th Vintage of its aggregated micro-based…
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Charts
Info Graphs Sometimes pictures say more than a thousand words. Therefore, we selected a few graphs to present our main topics visually. If you should have any questions or would…
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Voting under Debtor Distress
Jakub Grossmann, Štěpán Jurajda
Abstract
There is growing evidence on the role of economic conditions in the recent successes of populist and extremist parties. However, little is known about the role of over-indebtedness, even though debtor distress has grown in Europe following the financial crisis. We study the unique case of the Czech Republic, where by 2017, nearly one in ten citizens had been served at least one debtor distress warrant even though the country consistently features low unemployment. Our municipality-level difference-in-differences analysis asks about the voting consequences of a rise in debtor distress following a 2001 deregulation of consumer-debt collection. We find that debtor distress has a positive effect on support for (new) extreme right and populist parties, but a negative effect on a (traditional) extreme-left party. The effects of debtor distress we uncover are robust to whether and how we control for economic hardship; the effects of debtor distress and economic hardship are of similar magnitude, but operate in opposing directions across the political spectrum.
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