We examine how populist governments influence political culture and economic outcomes. Some Austrian communities are governed by far-right populist mayors, directly elected by a majority of voters. We exploit close elections and find that the electorate becomes more polarized under populist...

The economic tradition of ordoliberalism, understood as the theoretical and policy ideas of the Freiburg School, emerged in 1930s and 1940s Germany. In the years thereafter, it was quickly superseded by Keynesianism and other theories imported from the English-speaking world. The crisis in...

This paper describes the role of government ideology on economic policy-making in the United States. I consider studies using data for the national, state and local level and elaborate on checks and balances, especially divided government, measurement of government ideology and empirical...

Higher economic growth was generated during Democratic presidencies compared to Republican presidencies in the United States. The question is why. Blinder and Watson (2016) explain that the Democratic-Republican presidential growth gap (D-R growth gap) can hardly be attributed to the policies...

Did austerity cause Brexit? This paper shows that the rise of popular support for the UK Independence Party (UKIP), as the single most important correlate of the subsequent Leave vote in the 2016 European Union (EU) referendum, along with broader measures of political dissatisfaction, are...

Africa's interior-to-coast roads are well suited to export natural resources, but not to support regional trade. Are they the optimal response to geography and comparative advantage, or the result of suboptimal political distortions? We investigate the political determinants of road paving in...

Theory and evidence suggest that in an environment of well-anchored expectations, temporary news or shocks to economic variables, should not affect agents ́expectations of inflation in the long term. Our estimated structural VARs show that both long- and short-term inflation expectations are...

Using a DSGE model with nominal wage rigidity, we investigate two scenarios for the Italian economy. The first considers sustained policy commitment to reform. The results indicate the possibility of 'growing out of bad initial conditions', if fiscal consolidation is combined with a program for...

We estimate a three-region (DE-REA-RoW) structural macroeconomic model, and we provide a counterfactual on how nominal exchange rate flexibility would have affected the German trade balance (TB) by simulating the shocks of the estimated model under a counterfactual flexible exchange rate regime....

Using detailed firm-level transactions data for UK imports, we find that invoicing in a vehicle currency is pervasive, with more than half of transactions in our sample invoiced in neither sterling nor the exporter's currency. We then study the relationship between invoicing currency choices and...