Public Choice begins with the observation that in politics, as in economics, individuals and institutions compete for scarce resources and that, therefore, the same methods of analyses used by economists to explain the behaviour of consumers and producers might also serve well to explain the...

We examine state income and government spending data to investigate the role of political parties and elections in state business cycles of the United States, and find strong support for the partisan political business cycles, both traditional and rational versions. The growth rate of per capita...

This event study uses economic forecasts and opinion polls to measure the response of expectations to election surprise. Use of forecast data complements older work on partisan cycles by allowing a tighter link between election and response thereby mitigating concerns of endogeneity and omitted...

The plan of this report is the following. In the next section we present a conceptual background, reviewing the basic opportunistic political business cycle, the problems with monetary theories, and the theory and evidence supporting the existence of a political fiscal cycle. In section 3, we...

Lambrinidis M., Psycharis Y. and Rovolis A. (2005) Regional allocation of public infrastructure investment: the case of Greece, Regional Studies 39 , 1231-1244. This paper develops a model on the determinants of the regional allocation of public infrastructure investment and applies it to Greece...

Viewing fiscal policies as the outcome of democratically resolved conflicts of households over public goods and taxes, the “economic model of politics” proposes a public choice approach, which does not rely on social welfare functions. With it, a country’s overall budget can be derived...

This paper constructs and examines a macroeconomic model which combines features from both real and political business cycle models. We augment a standard real business cycle tax model by allowing for varying levels of government partisanship and competence in order to replicate two important...

The existing literature on political budget cycles looks at the temptation for incumbent governments to run a greater deficit before an election by considering the characteristics of the incumbent. We propose here to look at the signals the incumbent receives from the voters. For this purpose,...

We investigate the behavior of consumer confidence around national elections in the EU-15 coun- tries during 1985:1-2007:3. Consumer con¯dence increases before the date of elections and falls subsequently by almost the same amount. It is able to predict the strength of the performance of the...