We incorporate semiotics into economic theory, modeling communication with an encoding-decoding step where the sender transmits a message that the receiver can understand if and only if a common natural language is used. We add an inferential step where the receiver may either believe the...

Se reseñan los ciclos electorales en el producto (political business cycles) que son generados por políticos oportunistas que quieren ganar elecciones vía la manipulación de la política monetaria. El hilo argumental arranca con la contribución original de Nordhaus (1975), con agentes...

Primero usamos casos empíricos concretos para motivar la discusión de los ciclos electorales en política fiscal. Luego presentamos una revisión teórica y econométrica de la literatura. Teóricamente, los ciclos se pueden interpretar en términos de un problema de inconsistencia temporal...

The links between subnational political budget cycles (PBCs) and the national government in federal countries have seldom been studied. We study the behavior of the budget balance, public expenditures, and revenues in Argentine provinces during the 1985–2001 period. We find that in election...

In Latin America there is ample evidence of exchange rate depreciations after elections. Hence, we turn to the behavior of international reserves over the 1980–2005 period to investigate if exchange rates are temporarily stabilized before elections. Using annual, quarterly, and monthly data to...

Under asymmetric information, dishonest sellers lead to market unraveling in the lemons model. An additional cost of dishonesty is that language becomes cheap talk. We develop instead a model where people derive utility from actions (what they say), as well as from outcomes, so talk is costly....

La política fiscal es el resultado de un proceso de decisión colectivo. Este proceso está más institucionalizado en las democracias constitucionales donde es clave la competencia electoral entre partidos para definir qué políticas se van a llevar a cabo. Si bien el votante mediano es...

Loan and bond finance during 1985-2005 can be divided into three sub-periods. After the 1982 debt crisis, which mainly involved domestic and foreign bank loans to both the corporate and government sectors, there was practically no credit. This situation of lack of credit persisted until the...

While existing cross-country studies on political budget cycles rely on annual data, we build a panel with quarterly and monthly data from Latin American and OECD countries over the 1980-2005 period. Disaggregated data allow to center the electoral year more precisely, and show the effects are...