The purpose of this paper is to test for evidence of opportunistic "political business cycles" in a large sample of 18 OECD economies. Our results can be summarized as follows: 1) We find very little evidence of pre-electoral effects of economic outcomes, in particular, on GDP growth and...

This paper studies whether the dynamic behavior of GNP growth, unemployment and inflation is systematically affected by the timing of elections and of changes of governments. The sample includes the last three decades in 18 OECD economies. We explicitly test the implication of several models of...

This paper investigates the relationship between political instability and per capita GDP growth in a sample of 113 countries for the period 1950-1982. We define ?political instability? as the propensity of a government collapse, and we estimate a model in which political instability and...

This paper studies whether the dynamic behavior of GNP growth, unemployment, and inflation is affected by elections and changes of governments. The sample includes the last three decades in eighteen OECD economies. The authors' results are as follows: (1) the "political business cycle"...

Summary Diba and Grossman (1987) demonstrated that the conception of a rational bubble as defined by Blanchard and Watson (1982) is impossible. The present paper shows that this impossibility theorem also applies under various imperfections and irrationalities. These are: sticky goods prices,...

Das Schweizer Bankgeheimnis und die damit verbundenen Möglichkeiten zur Steuerhinterziehung haben in anderen Staaten zu erheblichen Verlusten bei den Haushaltseinnahmen und weitergehenden Wohlfahrtseinbußen geführt. Die Europäische Kommission ist bemüht, die Problematik nachhaltig zu...