Recent research has demonstrated that while government expenditures are countercyclical inmost industrialized countries, they tend to be procyclical in developing countries. We develop adynamic political economy model to explain this phenomenon. In the model, public expendituresprovide insurance...

Both conventional wisdom and leading academic research view pork barrel spendingas antithetical to responsible policymaking in times of crisis. In this paper we presentan alternative view. When agents are heterogeneous in their ideology and in theirinformation about the economic situation,...

The Industrial Revolution continues to be analysed by economic historians deploying the conceptual vocabularies of modern social science, particularly economics. Their approach which gives priority to the elaboration of causes and processes of evolution is far too often and superficially...

This paper tests whether education levels di¤er between leadersselected in autocracies and democracies. We use a unique data seton over 1300 world leaders between 1848 and 2004 and exploit withincountry variation from transitions to and from democracy to show thatdemocracies pick more highly...

This paper aims to test empirically if certain frequently used measures of wellbeing,which are regarded as valuable properties of human life, are actuallydesired by people. In other words, it investigates whether the “expertjudgments” in social science overlap with social consensus on what...

In the Former Soviet Union, the early 1990s were characterized by largefalls in GDP and small changes to already low unemployment. The slowadjustment to unemployment was a result of employers using variousmeans to maintain employment levels, including; extended periods ofunpaid leave, reduced...