Wars of Attrition in Italian Government Coalitions and Fiscal Performance: 1948-1994.

We test the "war of attrition" models of fiscal performance on the sample of Italian governments from 1948 to 1994. We control for conditioning phenomena, like government stability, majority size, central bank independence, political budget cycle and external economic constraints, as well as for business cycle indicators. We improve on the standard specifications of war of attrition models by considering the role of the opposition and by using ex ante measures of coalitions fragmentation. Once these phenomena are accounted for, data support the implications of our version of the war of attrition models. Copyright 2001 by Kluwer Academic Publishers