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...

This paper studies a principal-agent model of the relationship between an incumbent officeholder and the electorate, where the officeholder is initially uninformed about her ability. If officeholder effort and ability interact in the ""production function"" that determines performance in office,...

We investigate whether private information about citizens'' competence in political office can be revealed by their entry and campaign expenditure decisions. We find that this depends on whether voters and candidates have common or conflicting interests; only in the former case can entry be...

This paper studies the interactions between electoral considerations and the imposition of price controls by opportunistic policymakers. The analysis shows that a policy cycle emerges in which price controls are imposed in periods leading to the election, and removed immediately afterwards. The...

Since the mid-1970s, there has been considerable research on the macroeconomic consequences of wage indexation. Nonetheless, until recently, this research had not explicitly explored the implications of contracts that index wages to lagged inflation, the usual type of wage indexation observed in...

The performance of macroeconomic indicators of capital mobility is examined in the context of an intertemporal equilibrium model of a small open economy. Recursive numerical solution methods are used to compute measures of consumption smoothing, savings-investment correlation, and the...

We develop a New-Open-Economy-Macro model in which Ricardian equivalence does not hold because of (i) distortionary labor and corporate income taxation; (ii) limited asset market participation; and (iii) because the overlapping-generations structure results in a disconnect between current and...

The aim of the paper is to shift the focus of famine analysis away from food supply towards the macroeconomic determinants of food entitlement—i.e., to the ability of individuals to purchase food. Towards this end, we develop a model to demonstrate how loose monetary and fiscal policies may...

In several recent articles, the Barro-Grossman model of general equilibrium under shortage has been modified to incorporate money demand and alternative retail sales mechanisms. This paper extends this work to allow for spillovers in deficit goods markets (modeled as feedback of black market...

This paper describes a computer program with which one can build macroeconomic models. It is possible to specify up to eighteen behavioral equations, each with between five and eleven independent variables. For certain variables, the user can decide whether they will be endogenous or exogenous....