This note provides an overview of recent studies that have begun to investigate how differing moral perspectives shape attitudes toward tax and spending policies. Recent advances in evolutionary moral psychology and their application to survey-based economic analysis yield promising insights....

This paper uses an individual-level survey conducted by the Edelman Trust Barometer in mid-April for 11 advanced and emerging market economies to examine perceptions of government performance in managing the health and economic crisis, beliefs about the future, and attitudes about...

In this paper, we review the role of the political economy in inclusive growth. We find that political economy forces on the demand and supply side have weakened redistribution over time and contributed to a new wave of populism. We document growing support for a rethink of the social contract...

We look at the effect of exchange rate regimes on fiscal discipline, taking into account the effect of underlying political conditions. We present a model where strong politics (defined as policymakers facing longer political horizon and higher cohesion) are associated with better fiscal...

This paper provides evidence of fiscal procyclicality, excessive deficits, distorted budget composition and poor compliance with fiscal rules in the euro area. Our analysis relies on real-time data for 19 countries participating in the euro area over 1999-2015. We look for, but do not find,...

While there is an extensive literature examining the economic impact of conflict and political instability, surprisingly there have been few studies on their impact on the probability of banking crises. This paper therefore investigates whether rising conflict and political instability globally...

Sovereign debt restructurings are perceived as inflicting large losses to bondholders. However, many bonds feature high coupons and often exhibit strong post-crisis recoveries. To account for these aspects, we analyze the long-term returns of sovereign bonds during 32 crises since 1998, taking...

The last decade or so has seen a mushrooming of new sovereign debt databases covering long time spans for several countries. This represents an important breakthrough for economists who have long sought to, but been unable to tackle, first-order questions such as why countries have differential...

This paper presents a model-based fiscal Taylor rule and a toolkit to assess the fiscal stance, defined as the change in the structural primary balance. This is built on the normative buffer-stock model of the government (Fournier, 2019) which includes key channels like hysteresis,...

This paper quantitatively assesses the effects of inflation shocks on the public debt-to-GDP ratio in 19 advanced economies using simulation and estimation approaches. The simulations based on the debt dynamics equation and estimations of impulse responses by local projections both suggest that...