the present paper examines the mitigating effect of monetary and fiscal policies on the “growth laffer curve” (glc) using a panel data of 38 high income countries over the period 2003-2012. adopting generalised method of moments (gmm) estimators, the paper finds evidence substantiating the presence of an inverted-u glc. moreover, the evidence suggests that the glc shifts downward by employing e...

This paper examines under what conditions fiscal policy in the form of government spending should contribute to macroeconomic stabilisation. To this end optimal fiscal targeting rules minimising the microfounded social loss are examined in the following settings. Firstly, for the benchmark New Keynesian model, where monetary policy is unconstrained, a neutrality result for fiscal obtains: fisca...

The efficient decentralized provision of public goods requires that special interest groups, such as municipal unions, do not exercise undue influence on the outcome of municipal elections and local fiscal policies. We develop a new political economy model in which a union can endorse one of the candidates in a local election. A politician that prefers an inefficiently large public sector can, ...

Policies designed to pursue an equity-led macroeconomic growth strategy must take into account feedback effects, with distribution itself influencing macroeconomic outcomes. Under the right conditions, a more equitable distribution of income and opportunities in the form of human development can be a stimulus to growth, funding further investments in human development. Developing the policies t...

Despite its widespread appeal and long history in American government, the initiative process remains controversial. One of the most recurrent criticisms is that the initiative allows well organized and well financed special interests to subvert the policy process. This article reports some scientific evidence on the subversion hypothesis. For the period 19872000, the evidence shows that the in...

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...

Assessments of colonial medicine in India have, until now, focused almost exclusively on questions related to human health. This article shifts attention to the subject of animal health and reexamines existing hypotheses about colonial medicine in India from this new perspective. It looks at the linkages between veterinary medicine and the military and fiscal policies of the colonial state, arg...

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...