This paper considers testing the hypothesis that errors in a panel data model are weakly cross sectionally dependent, using the exponent of cross-sectional dependence <img src="http://www.econ.cam.ac.uk/faculty/pesaran/wp12/image3.png" width="11" height="13" />, introduced recently in Bailey, Kapetanios and Pesaran (2012). It is shown that the implicit null of the <em>CD</em> test depends on the...

The literature on the rational political business cycle suggests that politicians systematically manipulate economic and fiscal conditions before elections to increase their chance of gaining reelection. Most tests of this theory look for evidence of pre- election distortions in fiscal policy....

This paper argues in favour of a closer link between decision and forecast evaluation problems. Although the idea of using decision theory for forecast evaluation appears early in the dynamic stochastic programming literature, and has continued to be used in meteorological forecasts, it is...

Many industrialised countries have experienced an increase in environmental awareness and support to green lobby groups in past decades. This paper develops a political-economy model to investigate to what extent a rise of environmentalism, via the induced change in political power structures,...

We evaluate the impact of real business cycle shocks on corruption and economic policy in a model of entry regulation in a representative democracy. We .nd that corruption is procyclical and regulation policy is counter-cyclical. Corrupt politicians engage in excessive stabilization of aggregate...

This paper examines the extent to which social interactions affect optimal consumption decisions in peer groups. To this purpose, a standard life-cycle model with quadratic utility is augmented to allow for three different forks of social interaction, namely, conformism, altruism, and jealousy....

A small quarterly macroeconometric model of the UK is estimated over the period 1965Q1 to 1995Q4 in eight core variables: domestic and foreign outputs, domestic and foreign prices (both measured relative to oil prices), the nominal effective exchange rate, nominal domestic and foreign interest...

Many scholarly articles on corruption give the impression that the world is populated by two types of people: the "sanders" and the "greasers". The "sanders" believe that corruption is an obstacle to development, while the "greasers" believe that corruption can (in some cases) foster...

This paper evaluates the extent of regulation in a democracy with political corruption. Elected politicians can restrict entry of firms in exchange for bribes from entrepreneurs. Full liberalisation implies free entry and allocative efficiency and is supported by a majority of voters. Voters...

Rational choice models predict that political competition and political participation have opposite effects on the size of government. We investigate these theories using data from a panel of 18 Latin American countries during the 20th century. Our research builds evidence for the prediction...