Several authors claim that voters in new democracies reward deficits at the polls and this fact is due to a lack of 'voter sophistication'. We test this claim for gubernatorial elections in Brazil, an important case study since it is the fourth most populous democracy in the world, displays a...

Political economists interested in discerning the effects of election outcomes on the economy have been hampered by the problem that economic outcomes also influence elections. We sidestep these problems by analyzing movements in economic indicators caused by clearly exogenous changes in...

Convergence concerns poor economies catching up with rich ones. At issue is what happens to the cross-sectional distribution of economies, not whether a single economy tends towards its own steady state. It is the latter, however, that has preoccupied the traditional approach to convergence...

Per capita incomes across European regions are not equal and do not stay constant; regional income distributions fluctuate over time. Such a process could have many possible limiting outcomes: complete equality (convergence), stratification, and continually increasing inequality are but three...

The relationship between economic and political liberalization has received a great deal of attention lately, yet the possibility of a non-linear relationship and the role of reversals remain largely neglected. Focusing on democratization and financial reform, this paper offers evidence for a...

Do exchange rates react to exogenous capital movements? We explore this issue based on the redefinition of the MSCI international equity indices announced on 10 December 2000 and implemented in two steps on 30 November 2001 and 31 May 2002. The index changes implied major changes in the...

There is a substantial theoretical literature on the potential effects of loyalty contracts, but a relative paucity of empirical work. This Paper employs the event study methodology to examine the effect of exclusionary contracts on firm performance in the ocean shipping industry. Shipping...

We explore how fiscal consolidations affect private sector confidence, a possible channel for the fiscal transmission that has received particular attention recently as a result of governments embarking on austerity trajectories in the aftermath of the crisis. Panel regressions based on the...

We analyze the reactions of stock returns and CDS spreads of banks from Europe and the United States to four major regulatory reforms in the aftermath of the subprime crisis, employing an event study analysis. In contrast to the public perception that nothing has happened, we find that financial...

Exploring the period since the inception of the euro, we show that secondary-market yields on Italian public debt increase in anticipation of auctions of new issues and decrease after the auction, while no or a smaller such effect is present for German public debt. However, these yield movements...