In this paper, we analyse employment and capital adjustments using a panel of plants from Colombia. We allow for nonlinear adjustment of employment to reflect not only adjustment costs of labour but also adjustment costs of capital, and vice-versa. Using data from the Annual Manufacturing...

Estimates for the US suggest that at least in some sectors productivity-enhancing reallocation is the dominant factor in accounting for productivity growth. An open question, particularly relevant for developing countries, is whether reallocation is always productivity enhancing. It may be that...

Whereas a political budget cycle was once thought to be a phenomenon of less-developed economies, some recent studies find such a cycle in a large cross-section of both developed and developing countries. We find that this result is driven by the experience of ‘new democracies’, where fiscal...

We consider a bargaining model of the interaction between a government and interest groups in which, unlike existing models, neither side is assumed to have all the bargaining power. The government will then find it optimal to constrain itself in the use of transfer policies to improve its...

We present and analyse an optimizing model which explains the counter-intuitive effects of fiscal policy in terms of expectations. If government spending follows an upward-trending stochastic process, which the public believes may fall sharply when it reaches specific `target points', then...

The relation between IMF conditionality and country ownership of assistance programs is considered from a political economy perspective, focusing on the question of why conditionality is needed if it is in a country’s best interests to undertake the reform program. It is argued that...

High interest rates to defend the exchange rate signal that a government is committed to fixed exchange rates, but may also signal weak fundamentals. We test the effectiveness of the interest rate defense by disaggregating into the effects on future interest rates differentials, expectations of...