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...

This paper argues that where institutions are strong, actors are more likely to participate in the political process through institutionalized arenas, while where they are weak, protests and other unconventional means of participation become more appealing. This relationship is explored...

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...

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...

In the early 2000s the Inter-American Development Bank launched a visionary and influential research agenda that dramatically improved understanding of the policymaking process (PMP) in Latin America. It did so by detailing the role played by key actors in the PMP and how those actors interacted...

The purpose of this paper is to test the main hypotheses of the recent theoretical literature on the political economy of reform for the case of the Latin American countries between 1985 and 1995. The paper first reviews the literature and extracts the main testable hypotheses. Then, a system of...

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,...

In the past thirty years, democratic freedom and competitive electoral processes have taken hold as never before in Latin America. This document zeroes in (by way of summarizing the results of nine detailed studies developed by field experts) on the intricate workings of democratic institutions,...

We investigate how economic inequality can persist in Latin America in the context of radical falls in political inequality in the last decades. Using data from Colombia, we focus on a critical facet of democratization - the entry of new politicians. We show that initial levels of inequality...