Medicare spends more than $200 billion a year; the politics surrounding the Medicare program cannot be fully understood without an adequate appreciation of that fact. An understanding of the political economy of Medicare is perhaps best achieved by thinking along three dimensions: (1) Medicare as redistributive politics; (2) Medicare as special-interest politics; and (3) Medicare as distributiv...

This paper investigates the asymmetric effects of monetary policy on economic growth over business cycles in Iran. Estimating the models using the Hamilton (1989) Markov-switching model and by employing the data for 1960-2012, the results well identify two regimes characterized as expansion and recession. Moreover, the results show that an expansionary monetary policy has a positive and statist...

Despite the predictions of standard trade theory, countries in the North are not indifferent between free migration and free trade. Explanations include the redistributive policies of the welfare state (Wellisch and Walz, 1998, this Review). This paper offers an explanation using the concept of social capital and extends the analysis to the South. The movement of people differs from the movemen...

the regressive nature of consumption taxes poses a challenge to partisan theory. using data for up to 20 oecd countries in the period 1970-2003 this article aims to explore the question of whether the idea that social democratic governments typically have to compromise on policy goals and core constituency interests to make themselves more appealing to the median voter necessitates the use of r...

Increasing labor mobility has an impact on all redistributive policy measures undertaken by national governments. This paper focuses on intergenerational redistribution, in particular PAYG financed public pension systems, and surveys some of the recent literature on this topic. Two different strands in the literature are covered: In the median-voter framework, policy outcomes depend on both the...

Abstract This paper shows how policy announcements can be used to manage expectations. Using regional variation in radio exposure, I evaluate the impact of FDR's 1935 Fireside Chat, which he showcased introduction important social policies, establishing a new expansionary cycle New Deal. document that cities withhigher exposure announcement exhibited significant increase spending on durable goo...

From the literature on decentralization, it appears that the …scal vertical imbalance is somehow inherent to multi-level governments. Using a stylized model we show that this leads to a reduction in the extent of redistributive …scal policies if the maximal tolerable size of government has been reached. To test for this empirically we use some high quality data, from the LIS dataset, on individ...

We examine the time-varying causal link between monetary policies and macroeconomy, macroprudential financial stability in China. find that expansionary policy leads to output growth, tightening price stability, quantitative or expanding price-based is effective maintaining stability. In response stagnation deflation, central bank implements an policy. To prevent turbulence, pursues a tight add...

The empirical evidence on voting behavior suggests that the individuals’ choice of the vote is explained, among other things, by policy issues and the voters’ partisan preferences over the party that rules the government. The evidence also indicates that the voters’ partisan preferences are the best predictor of the choice of the vote (Republican and Democratic voters tend to vote, respectively...