We identify a new explanation for political budget cycles (PBCs): politicians have stronger incentives to increase spending around elections in the presence of younger political parties. Previous research suggests that PBCs should be larger when voters are uninformed about politician...

Vote-buying is pervasive, but not everywhere. What explains significant variations across countries in the greater use of pre-electoral transfers to mobilize voters relative to the use of pre-electoral promises of post-electoral transfers? This paper explicitly models the trade-offs that...

This paper introduces a new explanation for political budget cycles: politicians have stronger incentives to increase spending around elections in the presence of younger political parties. Previous research has shown that political budget cycles are larger when voters are uninformed about...

Was economic growth in East Asia jobless? An analysis of Okun's Law in eight countries between 1997 and 2011 suggests that it was not. However, there is considerable variation across countries. Generally, the effect of growth on employment magnifies in more flexible labor markets. Yet even under...

A vast literature has established that governments may abuse policy instruments in order to enhance their popularity and thus their probability of reelection, resulting in political budget cycles. Yet do popular governments have the same incentives to boost their popularity through pre-electoral...

A debate has emerged whether countries with Muslim majorities are intrinsically more likely to be autocratic. Recent studies have traced this to the allegedly repressive nature of Islam. This article replicates the most recent study on this topic, published in Public Choice (Potrafke in Public...

Governments can finance fiscal expansions with debt to appear competent and boost their electoral prospects, resulting in a political budget cycle. This article shows that economic disturbances blur competence signals, dampening political budget cycles. Economic disturbances can be construed at...

Credit rating agencies have drawn criticism for failing to anticipate and deter root causes of the 2008-2009 financial crisis in the United States. However, this paper presents evidence that credit rating agencies regularly anticipate and deter governments in emerging democracies from...

Was economic growth in East Asia jobless? This paper addresses this question using data from eight East Asian countries during the period between 1997 and 2011 to estimate the Okun's Law Coefficient, which captures the relationship between growth and employment. The analysis suggests that growth...

Improving the investment climate is among the top priorities in development. The World Bank Group's Doing Business reports have become an important guide and benchmark to inform regulatory reforms aimed at unleashing the potential of the private sector. This paper discusses the potential role of...