Dr. Peter Dietsch

Peter Dietsch is professor in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Victoria. His research focuses on issues of economic ethics, notably on tax justice, normative dimensions of monetary policy, and on income inequalities. In addition to numerous articles in academic journals as well as public media, Dietsch is the author of Catching Capital – The Ethics of Tax Competition (Oxford University Press, 2015), co-author of Do Central Banks Serve the People? (Polity Press, 2018), and co-editor of Global Tax Governance – What is Wrong with It and How to Fix It (ECPR Press, 2016). For a detailed list of Dr. Dietsch's recent publications, please see our "What We're Writing" page.

For a full list of his publications as well as other information, please consult his personal website: https://peterdietsch.openum.ca/. 

Research interests
Currently, I am pursuing two main research projects. The first is a project on income inequality, which starts from the observation that individual productivity is contingent on the cooperation of others, to then ask what implications this fact should have for the distribution of income in our society. While the notion of a cooperative surplus was at the heart of classical economic thought, it has received far less attention in economic theory recently. Even if my case for a less inegalitarian distribution of income on these grounds were sound, this would raise the question of what explains the large discrepancies in income we observe today. In addition to standard explanations linked to globalization and technological change, I put forward a complementary explanation that locates one important determinant of income inequality in the very structure of the labour market itself: I argue that the configuration of bargaining power on labour markets has an inherent tendency to drive a growing wedge between low-income and high-income earners. Over the next few years, my goal is to bring the different aspects of my work on income inequality together in a book manuscript on just income inequality.
My second project consists in combining the analysis of economic policies from the perspective of efficiency with an evaluation of their ramifications for the distribution of income and wealth, democracy, the environment, and other values we might care about from a broader, social perspective. For example, I have done and continue to do extensive work on the phenomenon of tax competition; I am also interested in understanding the ways in which monetary policy, notably in response to the two economic crises in recent times, affects the distribution of wealth as well as the transition towards a more sustainable economy.

Background
MSc in Economics (St.Gallen, Switzerland, 1999); PhD in Philosophy (London School of Economics, 2004); postdoctoral fellowships at the Chaire Hoover, Université catholique de Louvain-la-Neuve (2004) and the Centre de recherche en éthique de l’Université de Montréal (2004-2005). From 2005 to 2021, Dietsch taught in the Département de Philosophie at Université de Montréal. Dietsch became a member of the College of New Scholars, Artists and Scientists of the Royal Society of Canada in 2017 and received the Friedrich Wilhelm Bessel Research Award of the Humboldt Foundation in 2021.