About Professor Barta

Zsófia Barta joined the faculty of Rockefeller College at the University at Albany in fall 2013. Dr. Barta's research and teaching interests are in the areas of comparative politics, political economy and public policy, with particular focus paid to the societal origins of policy variation within political economy. Her main research area has been the politics of public debt accumulation, covering diverse aspects of public finances from societal conflicts surrounding austerity to the influence of market actors — primarily rating agencies — on fiscal policies. She is working on a book manuscript that explores the variations in countries' abilities to deal with excessive debt accumulation. At Rockefeller, Dr. Barta teaches undergraduate and graduate courses in comparative public policy, public finances and the welfare state. She comes to the University at Albany after completing her PhD in European Political Economy at the London School of Economics and Political Science. Dr. Barta held a Max Weber Postdoctoral Fellowship at the European University Institute in Florence.

Selected Publications

•  Zsófia Barta and Waltraud Schelkle. (Forthcoming). 'At cross-purposes: commercial versus technocratic assessments of sovereign debt in the EU' Journal of European Integration

• Zsófia Barta. (Forthcoming) 'Fiscal sustainability and the welfare state in Europe' forthcoming in the Routledge Handbook of Sustainable and Social Finance. Othmar Lehner (ed.) Routledge

• Zsófia Barta. 'Flirting with disaster: The politics of debt in time' (under review)

• Zsófia Barta. 'Mañana: The societal origins of delayed fiscal adjustment' (under review)

• 'Rating politics – The political bias of rating agencies' EUI Working Paper 2012/08