This paper examines the asymmetric effects of monetary policy on output and the role of bank-lending behavior. We investigate whether contractionary and expansionary policies have asymmetric impacts on bank loans, and whether there are further differences in the response of small banks and big banks to policy actions. We also investigate the link between changes in bank lending and aggregate ec...

The paper develops a political economy model to assess the interplay between party formation and an environmental policy dimension viewed as secondary to the redistributive dimension. We de…ne being a secondary issue in terms of the intensity of preferences over this issue rather than in terms of the proportion of voters who care for the environment. Equilibrium policies are the outcome of an e...

We study the role of anonymous markets in which trades cannot be monitored by the government. We adopt a Mirrlees approach to analyze economies in which agents have private information and a benevolent government controls optimal redistributive tax policy. While unrestricted access to anonymous markets reduces the set of policy instruments available to the government, it also limits the scope o...

The poor favor redistribution and the rich oppose it, but that is not all. Social mobility may make some of today’s poor into tomorrow’s rich and since redistributive policies do not change often, individual preferences for redistribution should depend on the extent and the nature of social mobility. We estimate the determinants of preferences for redistribution using individual level data from...

The paper investigates how ex-ante uncertainty about a government policy with redistributive consequences will influence the proportion of agents in favor of it, if agents can trade policy contingent securities. If a subset of agents can insure against policy uncertainty, support for redistributive policies is always smaller than in a case where no insurance is available. Both the relation betw...