This paper uses a large panel data set to examine the relation between elections and fiscal policy. We find evidence of political budget cycles in both developed and developing countries: government spending increases before elections while revenues fall, leading to a larger deficit in election years. We demonstrate that political budget cycles are much larger in developing countries than in de...

We introduce aggregate uncertainty and complete markets into Blanchard’s (1985) perpetual youth model. We show how to construct a simple formula for the pricing kernel in terms of observable aggregate variables. We study a pure trade version of our model and we show it behaves much like the two-period overlapping generations model. Our methods are easily generalized to economies with production...

The possibility of the so called "non-Keynesian" was illustrated by several fiscal episodes in Europe during the last two decades, giving rise to a growing body of both theoretical and empirical literature. The purpose of this paper is twofold. First, a simple two period model for private consumption is presented in order to explain the possibility of both Keynesian and non-Keynesian effects of...

Well before the global financial crisis, the stance of fiscal policy in a number of countries had raised concerns about risks for the outcomes of monetary policy. To provide some insights this paper examines the fiscal-monetary interactions in a novel game theory framework with asynchronous timing of moves. It generalizes the standard commitment concept of Stackelberg leadership by making it dy...

No ONE WOULD dream of designing the human anatomy by disconnecting the controls of the left and right sides of the body. Yet, for the most important economic controls in a modern economy, monetary and fiscal policies, economists today generally endorse the separation of powers as a way of optimizing noninflationary growth. What are the costs and benefits of coordination and independence in macr...

The tax-expenditure hypothesis posed by Milton Friedman emphasizes a positive causal relationship between government tax revenues and government expenditures. If citizens do not have a correct perception of the real tax burden and under-estimate the price of public goods and services, there is a negative causal relationship between tax revenues and government expenditures, which indicates exist...

OBJECTIVE To investigate the potential for tobacco tax to contribute to the 2030 agenda for sustainable development by reducing tobacco use, saving lives and generating tax revenues. METHODS A model of the global cigarette market in 2014--developed using data for 181 countries--was used to quantify the impact of raising cigarette excise in each country by one international dollar (I$) per 20-...

Though fiscal policies of central governments sometimes provide modest insurance against regional income shocks, this paper shows that pro-cyclical fiscal policy among provincial governments can easily overwhelm these stabilizing effects. We examine the cyclicality of budget items among provincial governments in eight federations, showing that own-source taxes are highly pro-cyclical and contra...