Previous results on political cycles as a signal of competency assumed that opportunism was common knowledge. If opportunism is not common knowledge, there may be a partially pooling equilibrium where cycles indicate opportunism rather than competency. Insofar as more discretionality increases...

We construct a time series of political party ideology, based on Poole and Rosenthal's (1997) NOMINATE scores, for the 1950-98 period. The results show that (1) party ideology has become increasingly more polarized over this period; and (2) that it is very sensitive to business cycle conditions....

In this paper I aim to try defining New Political Economy (NEP) as the economic study of politics, with a macroeconomic focus. It emerged from the influences mainly from the criticism of theory of economic policy, political business cycle research, public choice theory and new institutional...

This study examines the effect of regulatory independence of the central bank in shaping the impact of electoral cycles on bank lending behaviour in Africa. It employs the dynamic system Generalized Method of Moments (SGMM) Two-Step estimator for a panel dataset of 54 African countries over the...

We use data on the subjective well-being of more than a quarter of a million people living in the OECD over the period 1975-92 to study the behavior of partisan social happiness functions. Controlling for personal characteristics of the respondents, year and country fixed effects and country...

In this paper we study the link between elections, fiscal policy and economic growth/fluctuations. The set-up is a dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model of growth and endogenously chosen fiscal policy, in which two political parties can alternate in power. The party in office chooses...

Using a novel measure of industry exposure to government spending, we document predictable variation in cash flows and stock returns over political cycles. During Democratic presidencies, firms with high government exposure experience higher cash flows and stock returns, while the opposite...

In this paper we study the link between elections, fiscal policy and aggregate fluctuations. The set-up is a stylized dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model incorporating both technology and political re-election shocks. The later are incorporated via a two-party model with elections. The...

The study investigates the behavior of committed expenses, investment expenditures and loan during an election period in Brazilian municipalities with a population equal to or greater than 50 thousand inhabitants, as well as whether these same municipalities meet the legal requirements regarding...