Existing models of contagious currency crises are summarized and surveyed, and it is argued that more weight should be put on political factors. Towards this end, the concept of political contagion introduced, whereby contagion in speculative attacks across currencies arises solely because of...

This paper develops a dynamic model of mismatch. Workers and jobs are randomly assigned to labor markets. Each labor market clears at each instant but some labor markets have more workers than jobs, hence unemployment, and some have more jobs than workers, hence vacancies. As workers and jobs...

Standard neoclassical growth models rarely admits international factor mobility: convergence may result from factor accumulation in a closed economy, or from technology transfer. Conventional models are thus poorly equipped to explain the contribution of international factor flows to convergence...

While technologies and policy fundamentals are presumably different internationally, inducing differences in growth rates, capital mobility is shown to be a powerful force in achieving complete growth rate equalization across countries. We provide evidence in support of this effect, showing that...

The purpose of this paper is to test for evidence of opportunistic "political business cycles" in a large sample of 18 OECD economies. Our results can be summarized as follows: 1) We find very little evidence of pre-electoral effects of economic outcomes, in particular, on GDP growth and...

The post-war United States exhibits two rather strong politico-economic regularities. The political regularity is that the party of the President has always lost votes in aid-term Congressional elections, relative to its Congressional vote in the previous elections; the economic regularity is...

Politicians have generally two motives: they wish to hold office as long as possible and wish to implement their preferred policies. Thus they face a trade-off between the policies which maximize their choices of reelection and their most preferred policies (or the policies most preferred by the...