We examine the impact of four factors on the fiscal policies of the euro-area countries over the last two decades: the state of public finances, the European fiscal rules, cyclical conditions and general elections. We rely on information actually available to policy-makers at the time of...

Whether discretionary fiscal policies in industrialized countries act counter- or pro-cyclically and whether their reaction is symmetric or asymmetric over the cycle are still largely unsettled questions. This uncertainty remains even when attention is restricted to euro-area countries, where...

The process through which economic policy is conceived and decided cannot be simply described as the optimisation of a well-defined loss function s ubject to the constraints provided by a model of the economy. Even egnoring the forbidding difficulties of eliciting a stable and explicit loss...

This paper studies the timing of privatization in 21 major developed economies in the 1977-2002 period. Duration analysis shows that political fragmentation plays a significant role in explaining government's decision to privatize: privatization is delayed longer in democracies characterized by...

This paper studies the role of citizens� demand for political information in elections and provides a possible explanation for the poor empirical support encountered by political economy models of income redistribution. It shows that incentives to gather political information may derive...

We study the magnitude, the determinants and the electoral consequences of pre-electoral fiscal manipulation by incumbent politicians. To this aim, we build a dataset covering all the Italian municipalities. We document several facts. First, there is a clear political cycle in the path of...

This paper studies how the independence and conservatism of a central bankrelate to the structure and stability of median voter preferences. This is done by means of a model of endogenous delegation in which an opportunistic policy-maker chooses the monetary regime (independence and...

This paper studies how the independence and conservatism of a central bank relate to the structure and stability of the median voter preferences. This is done by means of a model of endogenous delegation in which an opportunistic policy-maker chooses the monetary regime (independence and...

A political-economic model is provided to study the impact of low-skilled immigration on the receiving country's education system, in terms of sources of school funding, expenditure per pupil, and type of parents who are more likely to send children to privately funded schools. The education...

An extensive literature analyses the impact of upper-tier transfers on the spending behaviour of lower level governments. According to the median voter framework, a transfer from the centre should act as a lump sum grant to residents and thus be spent by jurisdictions in the same proportion as...