Daniel Mügge

Daniel Mügge is an Associate Professor at the Political Science Department of the University of Amsterdam, where he also received his Ph.D. His research concentrates on finance and its governance. He recently received an award for his new project “Fickle Figures,” which analyses the political economy underlying the calculation of macroeconomic indicators. In 2009, Mügge’s dissertation on European financial markets was honored with the ECPR Jean Blondel prize as best European political science dissertation of the year.

During his second stay at CES (the first being in 2012), Mügge will begin a five-year project to describe and explain differences in how countries measure key macroeconomic indicators. In his research, Mügge asks the deceptively simple question “What explains why we measure the economy the way we do?” Looking at policymakers in France, Germany, the United Kingdom and the USA, he evaluates which social, political and economic factors each country uses to create the formulas for calculating these indicators. He will also take a historical perspective and examine how these fundamentals have changed over time. The research will investigate how these countries calculate inflation, GDP growth, public deficits and unemployment and what their basis for these calculations states about their assessment of their economies’ health. The project is intended to promote public debate about meaningful measurements and allow policymakers to reflect on current practices.

Research interests

• Governance of artificial intelligence
• The political economy of economic indicators
• Financial markets and their regulation
• European governance