We present a detailed, high-frequency dataset on the civil conflict in Colombia during the period 1988-2002. We briefly introduce the Colombian case and the methodological issues that hinder data collection in civil wars, before presenting the pattern over time of conflict actions and intensity...

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...

East Germany remains unique among the transition economies. Soon after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, it became part of the Federal Republic of Germany. German Union meant the transplantation of West Germany's legal, administrative and economic infrastructure to the five new Länder. The...

This paper presents a model of electoral accountability to compare the public finance outcomes under a presidential-congressional and a parliamentary system. In a presidential-congressional system, contrary to a parliamentary system, there are no endogenous incentives for legislative cohesion,...

The recent literature on endogenous economic growth allows for the effects of fiscal policy on long-term growth. If the social rate of return on investment exceeds the private return, tax policies that encourage investment can raise the growth rate and levels of utility. An excess of the social...

The paper presents a theoretical analysis of the relationship between privatization and public deficit finance. We examine the optimal magnitude of public asset sales and the extent to which privatization can be used to reduce taxes, or, to retire public debt, for two cases. In the first,...

How to use an unexpected increase in tax revenues (tax pots) has been an important issue in most OECD countries in the second half of the 90’s, the question being more precisely what to do with those windfall revenues: decreasing taxes, debt, increasing expenditures? In this paper, we study...

This study updates and extends to the period 1988/9--1992/3 our earlier analysis of the public finances of India. The foreign exchange crisis of early 1991 forced the government to recognize the severity of the fiscal crisis it was facing and led to the implementation of a restrictive fiscal and...