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Journal Article
The political economy of balanced budget amendments
A balanced budget amendment is a constitutional rule requiring that the government collect enough revenue to finance its expenditures every year. The motivation for introducing such a rule is the desire to restrict deficit spending and limit increases in government debt. However, policymakers strongly disagree about the rule?s coverage and provisions. In particular, they disagree on how to define the terms revenue and expenditures and under which conditions exceptions to the rule should be allowed. In this article, Marina Azzimonti provides an overview of the arguments raised by proponents ...
Briefing
Partisan Conflict in the U.S. and Potential Impacts on the Economy
Partisan conflict is not new, either in American politics or elsewhere. For economists, politics per se is not of central interest, but its implications for economic activity are. The more specific step we take in this article is to relay how partisan legislative disagreement has evolved and how that may affect the economy. Of particular interest are the effects on how businesses delay hiring and investment when facing high policy uncertainty. We will focus on fiscal policy since it, unlike monetary policy, must be negotiated in legislative settings. We will also concentrate attention here on ...
Working Paper
Financial globalization, inequality, and the raising of public debt
During the last three decades, the stock of government debt has increased in most developed countries. During the same period, we also observe a significant liberalization of international financial markets and an increase in income inequality in several industrialized countries. In this paper we propose a multicountry political economy model with incomplete markets and endogenous government borrowing and show that governments choose higher levels of public debt when financial markets become internationally integrated and inequality increases. We also conduct an empirical analysis using OECD ...
Report
Pandemic Control in ECON-EPI Networks
We develop an ECON-EPI network model to evaluate policies designed to improve health and economic outcomes during a pandemic. Relative to the standard epidemiological SIR set-up, we explicitly model social contacts among individuals and allow for heterogeneity in their number and stability. In addition, we embed the network in a structural economic model describing how contacts generate economic activity. We calibrate it to the New York metro area during the 2020 COVID-19 crisis and show three main results. First, the ECON-EPI network implies patterns of infections that better match the data ...
Working Paper
Partisan conflict
American politics have become extremely polarized in recent decades. This deep political divide has caused significant government dysfunction. Political divisions make the timing, size, and composition of government policy less predictable. According to existing theories, an increase in the degree of economic policy uncertainty or in the volatility of fiscal shocks results in a decline in economic activity. This occurs because businesses and households may be induced to delay decisions that involve high reversibility costs. In addition, disagreement between policymakers may result in ...
Working Paper
The political economy of labor subsidies
We explore a political economy model of labor subsidies, extending Meltzer and Richard's median voter model to a dynamic setting. We explore only one source of heterogeneity: initial wealth. As a consequence, given an operative wealth effect, poorer agents work harder, and if the agent with median wealth is poorer than average, a politico-economic equilibrium will feature a subsidy to labor. The dynamic model does not have capital, but it has perfect markets for borrowing and lending. Because tax rates influence interest rates, another channel for redistribution appears, since a decrease in ...
Working Paper
Partisan cycles and the consumption volatility puzzle
Standard real business cycle theory predicts that consumption should be smoother than output, as observed in developed countries. In emerging economies, however, consumption is more volatile than income. In this paper the authors provide a novel explanation of this phenomenon, the ?consumption volatility puzzle,? based on political frictions. They develop a dynamic stochastic political economy model where parties that disagree on the size of government (right-wing and left-wing) alternate in power and face aggregate uncertainty. While productivity shocks affect only consumption through ...
Working Paper
The political polarization index
American politics have become increasingly polarized in recent decades. To the extent that political polarization introduces uncertainty about economic policy, this pattern may have adversely affected the economy. According to existing theories, a rise in the volatility of fiscal shocks faced by individuals should result in a decline in economic activity. Moreover, if polarization is high around election dates, businesses and households may be induced to delay decisions that involve high reversibility costs (such as investment or hiring under search costs). Testing these theories has been ...
Working Paper
The dynamics of public investment under persistent electoral advantage
This paper studies the effects of asymmetries in re-election probabilities across parties on public policy and their subsequent propagation to the economy. The struggle between groups that disagree on targeted public spending (e.g., pork) results in governments being endogenously short-sighted: Systematic underinvestment in infrastructure and overspending on targeted goods arise, above and beyond what is observed in symmetric environments. Because the party enjoying an electoral advantage is less short-sighted, it devotes a larger proportion of revenues to productive investment. Hence, ...