Alberto Alesina is distinguished for having introduced, or more properly re-introduced, political economy considerations into macroeconomic policy analysis. His seminal contributions to the problems of fiscal consolidation and the optimal size and number of nations (or the possibility that...

This paper examines the distributional consequences of public debt reduction achieved through spending cuts. Under the assumption that public goods and transfers are relatively more valuable to the poor, our calculations indicate that the elderly poor stand to lose from such policies. Debt...

We explore the dynamics of public debt in the presence of political shocks, in the form of shocks to preferences for public spending. Under commitment, optimal stabilization is obtained by combining an inflation target that is contingent on the political shock with a debt target that forces the...