Old and New: Government Transparency

Government Transparency and Policymaking

This paper identifies conditions under which voters are better off not knowing the policy choices of incumbents: we show that government transparency can actually lower voter welfare. To do so, we analyze a model of political agency where voters face two forms of uncertainty: uncertainty about the incumbent’s policy preferences and uncertainty about the relationship between policies and outcome...

Government Information Transparency∗

This paper studies a model of announcements by a privately informed government about the future state of the economic activity in an economy subject to recurrent shocks and with distortions due to income taxation. Although transparent communication would ex ante be desirable, we find that even a benevolent government may ex-post be non-informative, in an attempt to countervail the tax distortio...

Transparency and Corruption: Does E-Government Help?

Through its pioneering surveys in recent years, the Transparency International (TI) has tried to gauge the extent of corruption in different countries, identify Government departments where corruption appears to be most rampant, and establish some reasons why it seems to grow. Two major factors that contribute to the growth of corruption are the low probability of discovery, and perceived immun...

Federal government unveils modest transparency initiative.

New Keynesian versus old Keynesian government spending multipliers

Renewed interest in fiscal policy has increased the use of quantitative models to evaluate policy. Because of modelling uncertainty, it is essential that policy evaluations be robust to alternative assumptions. We find that models currently being used in practice to evaluate fiscal policy stimulus proposals are not robust. Government spending multipliers in an alternative empirically estimated ...