This paper explores the link between Brazil’s political institutions and its disappointing productivity and growth in recent decades. Although political institutions provide the president with incentives and the instruments to pursue monetary stability and fiscal discipline they simultaneously raise the costs of achieving those very objectives. The insulation of certain expenditures from presid...

The paper explores the implications of different autonomous demands, with differing rates of growth, in a demand-led growth model where policy makers are concerned about the ratios of public sector debt to income and external debt to income. The actual growth rate is explained in terms of the growth rate of aggregate demand, with emphasis in the formation of expectations about growth in the lat...

This paper examines the role of economic freedom in the empirical relationship between business cycle volatility and long-run growth across countries. In a diverse sample of 99 countries, it is shown that accounting for economic freedom’s influence on volatility mitigates or even eliminates the negative impact of volatility on growth. It is also possible that the impact of volatility on growth ...

We develop a horizontal R&D growth model that allows us to investigate the different channels through which financial reforms affect investment and patent activity. First, “micro” reform abolishes barriers entry in banking sector produces straightforward result: decrease lending rates stimulates economic growth. Second, “macro” removes restrictions on banks’ reserves credit controls. While this...

Abstract We show that politically connected banks influence economic activity. exploit shocks to individual banks’ political capital following close U.S. congressional elections. find regional output growth increases when active in the region experience an average positive shock their capital. The effect is economically large, but temporary, and due lower restructuring economy, not increased pr...

Testing cyclicality of fiscal policy is pertinent in any country to observe its type with the business cycle. In oil abundant economy, price and trade openness may also play a role determining cyclicality. This research probes economic growth, openness, on government consumption growth verify Saudi Arabia from 1971 2018. The cointegration test Pesaran (2001) utilized hypothesis augmented critic...

State incentive granting for the purpose of firm retention or recruitment remains highly controversial and is often portrayed as antithetical to long-range economic development planning. This paper uses quasi-experimental methods to measure the impact of state-level economic development incentives on employment growth at the establishment level in North Carolina. Using North Carolina’s rich his...

Article history: Received 23 February 2011 Received in revised form 25 April 2012 Accepted 3 May 2012 Available online 12 May 2012 A behavioral political economy framework is built on the basis of prospect theory to explain the induced and imposed institutional changes during China's market reform, giving special attention to the integrated effects of economic and political institutions. Accord...

This paper explores the intersections between the current trajectory of globalization, changes to the structure of employment, and policies for maintaining opportunities for decent employment. There are numerous outcomes of these interactions, including higher levels of open unemployment, growth of informal employment, downward pressure on the returns to labor, and a redistribution of risk from...

In games with multiple, Pareto-rankable equilibria and repeated play, does a history of playing an inefficient equilibrium make it harder for the players to reach the efficient equilibrium? In other words, can people ‘get stuck’ in bad equilibria? Using variants of the stag hunt, previous studies have found support for this, but they have relied on naturally occurring variation in precedent. I ...