The purpose of this paper is to test for evidence of opportunistic "political business cycles" in a large sample of 18 OECD economies. Our results can be summarized as follows: 1) We find very little evidence of pre-electoral effects of economic outcomes, in particular, on GDP growth and...

This paper uses a global macroeconomic simulation model to identify the factors that have contributed to global trade and financial imbalances in the 1980s. After investigating the properties of monetary and fiscal policies in the model, we examine whether the budgetary shifts in the OECD...

The paper explores the view that the Asian currency and financial crises in 1997 and 1998 reflected structural and policy distortions in the countries of the region, even if market overreaction and herding caused the plunge of exchange rates, asset prices, and economic activity to be more severe...

This paper presents an overview of recent theoretical and empirical research on 'liquidity models' in open economies; this is a class of optimizing models where money has effects on real asset prices and economic activity without relying on the 'ad-hoc' assumption of price/wage stickiness. The...

To assess the importance of economic interdependence and the potential gains from policy coordination in the European area, this paper analyzes the international transmission of policies and disturbances in a rational expectation dynamic general equilibrium simulation model of the work economy,...

This paper studies whether the dynamic behavior of GNP growth, unemployment and inflation is systematically affected by the timing of elections and of changes of governments. The sample includes the last three decades in 18 OECD economies. We explicitly test the implication of several models of...

This paper studies the effects of human and physical capital income taxation on growth, and examines how these effects depend on the technologies for human capital accumulation and 'leisure'. It then derives the normative implications of the analysis for the optimal taxation of factor incomes....

In this paper we investigate the role of credit institutions in transmitting monetary shocks to the domestic economy and to the rest of the world output. In modeling the monetary and financial sector of the economy we distinguish between monetary injections via lump-sum transfers to individuals...

The effects of income and consumption taxation are examined in the context of models in which the growth process is driven by the accumulation of human and physical capital. The different channels through which these taxes affect economic growth are discussed, and it is shown that in general the...

This paper develops an interpretation of the Asian meltdown focused on moral hazard as the common source of overinvestment, excessive external borrowing, and current account deficits. To the extent that foreign creditors are willing to lend to domestic agents against future bail-out revenue from...