We study monetary policy when the labor-market insiders set the wage so that the outsiders are involuntarily unemployed. If the insiders are in the majority, the representative insider will be the median voter. Consequently, neither an independent nor a government-dependent central banker is...

Several authors claim that voters in new democracies reward deficits at the polls and this fact is due to a lack of 'voter sophistication'. We test this claim for gubernatorial elections in Brazil, an important case study since it is the fourth most populous democracy in the world, displays a...

Is there a strategically beneficial time for political leaders to make international environmental commitments? Based on the political cycles theory we argue that leaders have incentives to delay costly ratification of international environmental agreements to the post-electoral period. However,...

This paper studies political cycles in a setting of international interdependence. Three main results are obtained. First in this context the political cycles caused by domestic elections are usually larger than is indicated in the previous literature. Second, political cycles can be generated...

This paper studies the features of political cycles in a setting of international interdependence caused by inflation linkages. The main results are the following. Political cycles caused by domestic elections are larger than without international linkages. Political cycles caused by domestic...

This paper uses annual data from 1870 and 2000 in Canada to test whether overtly political variables interact with macroeconomic variables through government size. We begin by asking whether Canada’s macro data is consistent with political cycles, i.e., the hypothesis that macro cycles have...

When the government must decide not only on road public-policy programs (like investment in infrastructure) but also on the provision of group-specific public goods (like regional transfers or subsidies), dynamic strategic inefficiencies arise. I present a model where the struggle between...

This paper discusses the emergence of endogenous redistributive cycles in a stochastic growth model with incomplete asset markets and heterogeneous agents, where agents vote on the degree of progressivity in the tax-transfer-scheme. The model draws from Bénabou (1996) and ties the bias in the...

The paper discusses several questions related to the economic cycles, from the scientific methodological approach to isolate the economic cycles, to an empirical application using data of the Portuguese industrial sector, passing by the identification of the real economic cycles that modulated...