Two literatures in political economy argue that differences in political institutions help explain variation in the fiscal performance of countries. They indentify electoral systems and institutions that structure the formation of the budget as important determinants of the budget deficit. In...

Conventional wisdom argues that spending levels and, by extension, budget deficits will be higher for governments using bottom-up instead of top-down methods of budgeting. Ferejohn and Krehbiel (1987) appear to debunk this argument. They indicate that the superiority of one method over the other...

Identifying banking crises is the first step in the research on determinants of banking crises. The prevailing practice is to employ market events to identify a banking crisis. Researchers justify the usage of this method on the grounds that either direct and reliable indicators of banks’...