In recent years, many emergency lending mechanisms have failed dramatically in their goal of providing financing of last resort to borrowers in need for liquidity: potential borrowers have been reluctant to seek financing, fearing that a request for funds could be seen as a sign of financial...

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

deficits before elections —when new democracies are particularly fragile - in the attempt to convince voters that “democracy works”, with these expenditures going primarily to citizens rather than elites. Data on the composition of election year expenditure increases in new democracies are...