The conventional wisdom is that politicians' rent-seeking motives increase public debt and deficits. This is because myopic politicians face political risk and prefer to extract political rents as early as possible. In this paper we study the determination of government debt and deficits in a...

The conventional wisdom is that politicians' rent-seeking motives increase public debt and deficits. This is because myopic politicians face political risk and prefer to extract political rents as early as possible. An implication of this argument is that governments will under-save during a...

The conventional wisdom is that politicians' rent seeking motives increase public debt and deficit. This is because myopic politicians face political risk and prefer to extract political rents as early as possible. An implication of this argument is that governments will under-save during a...

The conventional wisdom is that politicians' rent-seeking motives increase public debt and deficits. This is because myopic politicians face political risk and prefer to extract political rents as early as possible. An implication of this argument is that governments will under-save during a...

This paper examines the impact of oil revenues on the Iranian economy over the past hundred years, spanning the period 1908-2010. It is shown that although oil has been produced in Iran over a very long period, its importance in the Iranian economy was relatively small up until the early 1960s....