We investigate the causal relationship between the public debt to GDP ratio and economic growth for 31 EU and OECD countries from 1995 to 2013. A number of studies have tackled this problem, but very few make the transmission mechanism explicit in their analysis. We estimate a panel VAR model...

Economic research shows that candidates have a higher chance of getting (re-)elected when they have the luck that the world economy does well even though this is beyond their control and unrelated to their competence. Psychological research demonstrates that candidates increase their chances if...