We consider an economy where competing political parties alternate in office. Due to rent-seeking motives, incumbents have an incentive to set public expenditures above the socially optimum level. Parties cannot commit to future policies, but they can forge a political compromise where each...

Sovereign default is often associated with the downfall of incumbent governments in democratic polities. Existing scholarship directs attention to the relationship between default and domestic politics and institutions rather than the broader international environment wherein repayment and...

According to Principal-Agent theory, states (the principal) delegate the implementation of a legalized agreement to an international organization (the agent). The conventional wisdom about states’ capacity to control international organizations is that differences among the member states...

Each year, many pregnant women fast from dawn to sunset during the Islamic holy month of Ramadan. Medical theory suggests that this may have negative long-term health effects on their offspring. Building upon the work of Almond and Mazumder (2008), and using Indonesian crosssectional data, I...

This study sets out to identify the incidence and development of disabled children’s problem behaviours, including conduct, peer, hyperactivity and emotional problems during the early years using the Millennium Cohort Study, a large-scale, nationally representative UK study. We track the...

During the period 1974-1999 the percentage of elderly living with their children in Greece reduced from 55 per cent to about 32 per cent. In this paper we examine determinants of the decrease in intergenerational co-residence among Greek elderly people and their adult children and its...

Do wealth shocks affect the health of the elderly in developed countries? The economic literature is skeptical about such effects which have so far only been found for poor retirees in poor countries. In this paper I show that wealth shocks also matter for the health of wealthy retirees in the...

The risk of high costs of long-term care services and supports (LTSS) is one of the largest uninsured risks for American families and a major challenge to the sustainability of Medicaid. To address the latter, the long-term care partnership (LTCP) program was an initiative designed to encourage...

We study the mechanics of transmission of fiscal shocks to labour markets. We characterize a set of robust implications following government consumption, investment and employment shocks in a RBC and a New- Keynesian model and use part of them to identify shocks in the data. In line with the...