We investigate the effects of fiscal transparency and political polarization on the prevalence of electoral cycles in fiscal balance. The recent political economy literature on electoral cycles identifies such cycles mainly in weak and recent democracies. In contrast, we show, conditioning on a...

This paper discusses Ireland’s Fiscal Transparency Assessment. The Irish government has ambitious plans to improve further the timeliness, quality, and comprehensiveness of its budgets, statistics, and accounts. Ireland has the capacity and information to bring its fiscal transparency...

This paper examines why fiscal policy is procyclical in developing as well as developed countries. We introduce the concept of fiscal transparency into a model of retrospective voting, in which a political agency problem between voters and politicians generates a procyclical bias in government...

This paper analyzes the macroeconomic impacts derived from the recognition of previously unreported fiscal liabilities during 2015 in Brazil. This is done within a DSGE model with a detailed public sector developed and calibrated for the Brazilian economy. The gradual recognition of these fiscal...

This paper analyzes the macroeconomic impacts derived from the recognition of previously unreported fiscal liabilities during 2015 in Brazil. This is done within a DSGE model with a detailed public sector developed and calibrated for the Brazilian economy. The gradual recognition of these fiscal...

Over the past three decades, public spending on infrastructure, as a share of GDP, has been on the decline worldwide. Although the link between infrastructure investment and economic growth is not yet fully understood, the quality of infrastructure clearly affects a country's productivity,...

The recent economic crisis, one of the symptoms of which is a sudden increase of public debt in the majority of OECD countries, again made the government and the society aware of the necessity for conducting transparent, but also responsible fiscal policy. Creating a framework of the fiscal...