Do elections allow voters to express their policy preferences, with change in government spending patterns following the election of a new leader? How long does it take for the composition of government spending to change following a change in leadership? Or, do significant spending changes...

We present a model of the Political Budget Cycle in which voters and politicians have preferences for different types of government spending. Incumbents try to influence voters by changing the composition of government spending, rather than overall spending or revenues. Rational voters may...

Since a key function of competitive elections is to allow voters to express their policy preferences, one might take it for granted that when leadership changes, policy change follows. Using a dataset we created on the composition of central government expenditures in a panel of 71 democracies...

We present a model of political budget cycles in which incumbents influence voters by targeting government spending to specific groups of voters at the expense of other voters or other expenditures. Each voter faces a signal extraction problem: being targeted with expenditure before the election...

Since a key function of competitive elections is to allow voters to express their policy preferences, one might take it for granted that when leadership changes, policy change follows. Using a dataset we created on the composition of central government expenditures in a panel of 71 democracies...

Whereas a political budget cycle was once thought to be a phenomenon of less-developed economies, some recent studies find such a cycle in a large cross-section of both developed and developing countries. We find that this result is driven by the experience of ‘new democracies’, where fiscal...

We present a bargaining model of the interaction between a government and interest groups in which, unlike most existing models, neither side is assumed to have all the bargaining power. The government finds it optimal to constrain itself in the use of transfer policies to improve its bargaining...