This paper develops a semiotic-inferential model of verbal communication for incomplete information games: a language is seen as a set of conventional signs that point to types, and the credibility of a message depends on the strategic context. Formally, there is an encoding-decoding step where...

We build a panel with quarterly data from Latin American and OECD countries over the 1980-2005 period. Annual data strongly underestimate the effect of political budget cycles (PBCs) when a pre-electoral fiscal expansion is followed by a post-electoral contraction, since the effects cancel out...

From a theoretical viewpoint, political budget cycles (PBC) arise in equilibrium when rational voters are imperfectly informed about the incumbent's competency and the incumbent enjoys discretionary power over the budget. This paper focuses on the second condition, examining how executive...

We start out from the hypothesis that limited government leads to low uncertainty and low transaction costs. If political institutions affect the degree of uncertainty and transaction costs, we formally show they should affect the steady state level of income per capita. The impact of...

What happens to job market signaling under two-dimensional asymmetric information? With 2 types of productivity and noise, the equilibrium remains separating if an extended single-crossing condition is satisfied. If not, there are partially pooling equilibria where only extreme types can be...

The permanent income/transitory income distinction from consumption functions can be applied to cost functions. Transitory deviations of actual output from potential output, i.e. variations in capacity utilization, are relevant for the pattern of U-shaped average costs found in econometric...

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...

Aunque la inflación lleva a la substitución de monedas, en principio no tiene por qué afectar a un sistema financiero indexado. Sin embargo, en la Argentina la intermediación financiera se fue evaporando en el transcurso del proceso inflacionario. La inflación se enfoca como síntoma de una...

An incumbent's drive for reelection can lead to political budget cycles. The distortion cycles cause in economic policy may be offset by the information they indirectly provide about the incumbent's competency. The informative content of cycles depends on the sophistication of voters, i.e. on...

This paper focuses on a monetary explanation of real exchange rate fluctuations, namely capital flight provoked by the process of currency substitution. Under fixed exchange rates, capital inflows to reconstitute domestic money holdings produce a positive liquidity effect due to the creation of...