While economists have tended to focus on specific public policies when developing recommendations, the achievement of welfare objectives might depend more on the quality of policies than their content. This paper develops several measures of the qualities of policies across countries, arguing...

This paper introduces preliminary evidence from a cross-country database of policy characteristics and potential uses of that database. While most databases have emphasized either the content of policies (e.g., size of government deficits) or countries' formal institutions (e.g., political...

We present and test a theory of prospective and retrospective pocketbook voting. Focusing on two large reforms in Sweden, we establish a causal chain from policies to sizeable individual gains and losses and then to voting. The Social Democrats proposed budget cuts affecting parents with young...

We study identification of preferences in static single-agent discrete choice models where decision makers may be imperfectly informed about the state of the world. We leverage the notion of one-player Bayes Correlated Equilibrium by Bergemann and Morris (2016) to provide a tractable...

Between the 2014 and 2018 Swedish parliamentary elections, the vote share of the anti-immigration Sweden Democrats increased significantly. To evaluate the possibility of a causal link between immigration and the right-wing populist vote, this paper uses data from a nationwide policy experiment,...

Following ECB-president Draghi's remark that the European Social Model does no longer exist and the crisis can only be overcome through a combination of austerity and structural reform, this paper examines the consequences of austerity measures and structural reforms adopted during the crisis in...

We use U.S. county-level data to estimate convergence rates for 22 individual states. We find significant heterogeneity. E.g., the California estimate is 19.9 percent and the New York estimate is 3.3 percent. Convergence rates are essentially uncorrelated with income levels.

We use US county level data (3,058 observations) from 1970 to 1998 to explore the relationship between economic growth and the extent of government employment at three levels: federal, state and local. We find that increases in federal, state and local government employments are all negatively...

The Structural Vector Auto-regression (SVAR) approach to estimating fiscal multipliers, following the seminal paper by Blanchard and Perotti (2002), has been widely applied in the literature. In our pa-per we discuss the interpretation of these estimates and suggest that they are more useful for...

The fiscal position can affect fiscal multipliers through two channels. Through the Ricardian channel, households reduce consumption in anticipation of future fiscal adjustments when fiscal stimulus is implemented from a weak fiscal position. Through the interest rate channel, fiscal stimulus...