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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 its subsequent propagation to the economy. The struggle between opposing groups ? that disagree on the composition of public consumption ? results in governments being endogenously short-sighted: Systematic under investment in infrastructure and overspending on public goods arise, as resources are more valuable when in power. Because the party enjoying an electoral advantage is relatively less short-sighted, it devotes a larger proportion of government revenues to productive public ...
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
Polarized business cycles
We are motivated by four stylized facts computed for emerging and developed economies: (i) business cycle movements are wider in emerging countries; (ii) economies in emerging countries experience greater economic policy uncertainty; (iii) emerging economies are more polarized and less politically stable; and (iv) economic policy uncertainty is positively related to political polarization. We show that a standard real business cycle (RBC) model augmented to incorporate political polarization, a `polarized business cycle' (PBC) model, is consistent with these facts. Our main hypothesis is that ...
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 ...
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 ...
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
Optimal public investment with and without government commitment
We analyze the problem of optimal public investment when government purchases of productive capital assets are financed through income taxes. Virtually all previous work in this literature has prescribed a share of public investment in GDP that is both constant and time consistent. This paper shows that this straightforward prescription derives from specific assumptions relating to preferences and technology. In a more general framework, the optimal policy is neither constant nor time consistent. With full commitment, a policymaker will typically choose a tax rate, or alternatively a share of ...
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, ...
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 ...