Economic theory and econometric evidence support the thesis that the displacement of government expenditures on public goods by subsidies to private goods inhibits the performance of the farm sector. This paper presents an analysis of the influence of the mix of expenditures related to...

What explains significant variation across countries in the use of vote buying instead of campaign promises to secure voter support? This paper explicitly models the tradeoff parties face between engaging in vote buying and making campaign promises, and explores the distributional consequences...

Do voters punish governments that introduce fiscal "austerity" measures? If so, does voter response vary according to the design (composition) of fiscal adjustments? What determines the timing of fiscal consolidations? The empirical literature on the political economy of fiscal adjustments,...

This paper analyzes the impact of Mapa- Regalías on efficiency in the execution of public investment projects in Colombia. MapaRegalías is an online platform that displays geo-referenced information and data on royalties coming from the extractives sector. The purpose of the platform is to...

This paper analyzes the impact of MapaRegalías on efficiency in the execution of public investment projects in Colombia. MapaRegalías is an online platform that displays geo-referenced information and data on royalties coming from the extractives sector. The purpose of the platform is to...

Economic theory and econometric evidence support the thesis that the displacement of government expenditures on public goods by subsidies to private goods inhibits the performance of the farm sector. This paper presents an analysis of the influence of the mix of expenditures related to...

The Peruvian economy has exhibited remarkable growth in the past 20 years. Good tax and monetary policies, along with comprehensive structural adjustment, which has attracted substantial foreign investment, are regarded as the pillars of this success. Notwithstanding the advances experienced on...

We show that some types of fiscal rules can mitigate the well-known procyclical bias in public capital expenditures. Past research has found that fiscal adjustment episodes coincide with large public investment cuts, a pattern we also document in a sample of 75 advanced and emerging economies...

This paper studies the cyclical properties of two key expenditure categories (current and public investment spending) during the different phases of the business cycle (good times and bad times). Anecdotal evidence suggests that policymakers usually cannot resist the temptation of spending more...

This paper surveys selected themes in the political economy of policymaking in Latin America, with an emphasis on recent research focusing on actual decision and implementation processes, and on the political institutions and state and social actors involved in those processes. In particular,...