Biography
I joined the Department of European & International Studies at King's College in September 2018 after teaching Political Economy at Goldsmiths College (University of London). I hold a PhD in Political Science from the Max Planck Institute of the Study of Societies in Cologne/University of Osnabrück where I submitted my thesis 'Common Ground: Justifications of Neoliberal Tax Cuts in the US and Germany'. My undergraduate degree and a diploma in Political Science were awarded by the Goethe-University Frankfurt.
Research
My research explores how micro-strategies contribute to global economic phenomena. I examine the critical juncture in the fiscal and monetary policy which led to the rise of finance and austerity. Instead of exploring strategies of states, I propose to focus on the different interests, strategies and conflicts within the state. I find that the rise of austerity and global finance resulted from a power struggle between central bankers and governments. While central bankers wanted to curtail government influence in the fiscal sphere, governments planned to limit central bank independence. To win this conflict, central bankers used strategies to sidestep governments. These included the negotiations about the end of the Bretton Woods system and domestic and international financial liberalisation. Theoretically, I propose to embed institutionalist approaches of state-actor strategies into IPE approaches.
I have examined the role of micro-strategies in the rise of neoliberal governance structures in three powerful central banks of the time: the Bundesbank, the Federal Reserve and the Bank of England, by gathering roughly 10,000 pages of archival documents from the 1960s to the 1990s. I use rigorous theory-testing process tracing with structured empirical tests after Beach and Pedersen (2013) to analyse the data. Currently, I am working on a book manuscript exploring the rise of austerity and finance in the US, the UK and Germany.
My work on central banks has been discussed in blogs including Phenomenal World https://www.phenomenalworld.org/sources/burning-bridge/ and Adam Tooze’s Chartbooks https://adamtooze.substack.com/p/chartbook-62-once-a-giant-the-decline?s=r
Forbes magazine had a feature article on my work on state-actor strategies and tax cuts (2021) https://www.forbes.com/sites/taxnotes/2021/12/06/the-process-of-persuasion-how-politicians-sell-tax-policies/
Research projects
The Political Economy of Growth Models in an Age of Stagnation
Recent publications
2021. One state, one interest? How a historic shock to the balance of power of the Bundesbank and the German government laid the path for fiscal austerity. Review of International Political Economy online first: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09692290.2021.1953109
2021. With Timur Ergen. The Silicon Valley imaginary: US corporate tax reform in the 1980s. Socio-Economic Review online first https://academic.oup.com/ser/advance-article/doi/10.1093/ser/mwab051/6397034?login=true
2021. Winning the votes for institutional change: How discursive acts of compromise shaped radical income tax reforms in the United States. Policy Studies online first: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/01442872.2021.1946027
2022. With Craig Berry & Matthew Watson. Introduction to the special section on Financialisation, state action and the contested policy practices of neoliberalisation. Competition & Change online first https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/10245294221086864
2021. The entangled state: How state-business relations shaped the German corporate tax regime. Competition & Change online first: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/1024529420985174
Teaching
Inga teaches German Politics with an emphasis on Political Economy problems of the German Model in Europe. In the 2020/2021 academic year she will be teaching the following modules: