Showing 1 - 10 of 1,433
In the presence of competing interest groups, this paper examines how the form of votebuying contracts affects policy outcomes. We study contracts contingent upon individual votes, policy outcomes, and/or vote shares. Voters either care about their individual votes, or about the policy outcome....
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10014404237
Electoral rules determine how voters' preferences are aggregated and translated into political representation, and their design can lead to the election of representatives who represent broader or narrower constituencies. Relying on a regression discontinuity design, I contrast single- and...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10012796797
Conventional wisdom holds that voters punish governments that implement fiscal austerity. Yet, most empirical studies, which rely on ex-post yearly austerity measures, do not find supportive evidence. This paper revisits the issue using action-based, real-time, ex-ante measures of fiscal...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10012613677
This paper estimates the causal effect of fiscal rules on political budget cycles in a sample of 67 developing countries over the period 1985-2007. We exploit the geographical pattern in the adoption of fiscal rules to isolate an exogenous source of variation in the adoption of national fiscal...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10012155128
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...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10014398107
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10010388760
The move from individual decision making to committee decision making is widely seen as a major evolution in contemporary central banking. This paper reviews the relevant economics and social psychology literatures with a view to providing some insights into the question of optimal monetary...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10014400188
We propose a theory to explain why, and under what circumstances, a politician gives up rent and delegates policy tasks … to an independent agency. We apply this theory to monetary policy by extending a standard dynamic ""New …-Keynesian"" stochastic general equilibrium model. This model gives a new theory of central bank independence that is unrelated to the …
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10014400234
Population aging puts significant pressure on social security systems that are based mainly on a pay-as-you-go (PAYG) formula and determined by the political process in which both retirees and future retirees participate. This paper demonstrates that in an economic and demographic steady state,...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10014400549
This paper examines the relationship between rent seeking and economic performance when governments cannot enforce property rights. With imperfect credit markets and a fixed cost of rent seeking, only wealthy agents choose to engage in it, since it enables them to protect their wealth from...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10014401029