For the last 40 years, macroeconomics has been dominated by Milton Friedman's view that inflation occurs when the supply of money rises more quickly than economic output – 'too much money chasing too few goods', as the saying goes. If inflation is always due to an imbalance of money supply and...

Aggregate votes for incumbent parties in post-war Germany were determined by the weighted-average growth of real per capita disposable income and the attrition of power, especially when the Federal Chancellor sought re-election more than twice. Similar to earlier results for the US, each...

Aggregate votes for incumbent parties in post-war Germany were determined by the weighted-average growth of real per capita disposable income. Each percentage point of per capita real disposable income growth sustained over the legislative term yielded approximately two percentage points of...

This paper studies the optimal level of discretion in policymaking. We consider a fiscal policy model where the government has time-inconsistent preferences with a present-bias towards public spending. The government chooses a fiscal rule to trade off its desire to commit to not overspend...

This paper studies the impact of tax-based consolidations on reelection outcomes. Using a granular database of tax-based consolidations for a panel of 10 OECD countries over the last 40 years, we find that tax reforms are politically costly but some reforms are costlier than others. Measures...

We study a fiscal policy model in which the government is present-biased towards public spending. Society chooses a fiscal rule to trade off the benefit of committing the government to not overspend against the benefit of granting it flexibility to react to privately observed shocks to the value...

Aggregate votes for incumbent parties in post-war Germany were determined by the weighted-average growth of real per capita disposable income. Each percentage point of per capita real disposable income growth sustained over the legislative term yielded approximately two percentage points of...

Neoliberalism has not given rise to a sustained profit-led growth process, but to a finance-dominated accumulation regime in which growth relies either on financial bubbles and rising household debt (‘debt-driven growth’) or on net exports (‘export-driven growth’). The financial crisis...

We study a fiscal policy model in which the government is present-biased towards public spending. Society chooses a fiscal rule to trade off the benefit of committing the government to not overspend against the benefit of granting it flexibility to react to privately observed shocks to the value...

State Public Pension funds have increased their portfolios into riskier alternative investments to meet their annual required contributions (ARC). Our paper uses The Public Plans Data (PPD) to analyze the differences in alternative investments for 2001 to 2013 by Democrats and Republican...