Understanding of the domestic political environment is key to building broad country ownership and the successful implementation of reform programs supported by international financial institutions (IFIs). But recipient countries are not unitary actors: policymakers are influenced by special...

IMF lending is generally conditional on specified policies and outcomes. These conditions usually are negotiated compromises between policies initially favored by the Fund and by the country's authorities. In some cases the authorities might be satisfied enough with the outcome to take...

This paper develops a model of political regulation in which politicians set the regulated price in order to maximize electoral support by signaling to voters a pro-consumer behavior. Political incentives and welfare constraints interact in the model, yielding an equilibrium in which the real...

Whereas the economics discipline possesses a highly refined theoretical apparatus to analyze the effects of government behaviour on the economy, it has not (yet) managed to fully develop a positively formulated "economic theory of politics" that would permit the integration of the...