Governments have great difficulties to design politically sustainable responses to rising public debt. These difficulties are grounded in a limited understanding of the popular constraints during times of fiscal pressure. For instance, an influential view claims that fiscal austerity does not...

Why do individuals' preferences for redistribution diverge widely from their material self-interest? Using an original online survey experiment spanning eight countries and 12,000 respondents across Latin America, one of the most unequal regions in the world, we find significant evidence for an...

The European debt crisis has uncovered a serious tension between democratic politics and market pressure in contemporary democracies. This tension arises when governments implement unpopular fiscal consolidation packages in order to raise their macroeconomic credibility among financial...

Why do individuals' preferences for redistribution often diverge widely from their material self-interest? Using an original online survey experiment spanning eight countries and 12,000 respondents across Latin America, one of the most unequal regions in the world, we find significant evidence...

Governments often pursue procyclical fiscal policies, even though they reduce voter welfare. Is this because voters actually prefer procyclical policies? The analysis in this paper exploits the first individual-level evidence from an original survey of 12,000 respondents in 8 countries across...

Though governments regularly implement fiscal adjustments to avert crisis, voter attitudes towards competing adjustment strategies are still poorly understood. A conjoint experiment with 8,000 survey respondents in Brazil, Colombia, Costa Rica, and Peru confirms that individuals prefer spending-...

This paper analyzes how political institutions affect the execution of exchange-rate policy. By focusing on policy-makers' responses to the emergence of speculative pressure on their currencies, we argue that the effect of democratic institutions on exchange-rate stability is likely to be...