Bogota is unique in recording and reporting the socioeconomic status of COVID-19 patients. As others in Latin America and Asia, the city imposed a blanket lockdown before contagion picked up in early 2020 and kept it in place for six months. We document that, during that period, being...

This paper surveys the recent literature on the political economy of fiscal policy, in particular the accumulation of government debt. We examine three possible determinants of fiscal balances: opportunistic behavior by policymakers, heterogeneous fiscal preferences of either voters or...