We develop the implications of political budget cycles for real exchange rates in a two-sector small open economy with a cash-in-advance constraint. Policy makers are office motivated politicians. Voters have incomplete information on the competence and the opportunism of incumbents. Devaluation...

High inflation economies often exhibit stop-go cycles of inflation, rather than smooth inflationary processes. This paper relates these stop-go episodes of inflation to a political cycle: the government can try to repress inflation until after the elections in order to increase the chances of...

This paper presents a rational political budget cycle model for the open economy, in which devaluations are delayed in the run-up to elections, in order to increase the electoral chances of the party in office. By concentrating on the closed economy, previous political cycle models had...

In contrast to previous empirical work on electoral cycles, which implicitly assumes the executive has full discretion over fiscal policy, this paper contends that under separation of powers an unaligned legislature may have a moderating role. Focusing on the budget surplus, we find that...

In Hume’s epistemology, induction leads to discovery in matters of fact. However, because of the poor data Hume analyzes the balance of trade with a thought experiment, doing what Mill makes explicit afterwards: reason from assumptions, to reach conclusions which are true in the abstract....

Primero usamos casos empíricos concretos para motivar la discusión de los ciclos electorales en política fiscal. Luego presentamos una revisión teórica y econométrica de la literatura. Teóricamente, los ciclos se pueden interpretar en términos de un problema de inconsistencia temporal...

The links between subnational political budget cycles (PBCs) and the national government in federal countries have seldom been studied. We study the behavior of the budget balance, public expenditures, and revenues in Argentine provinces during the 1985–2001 period. We find that in election...

In Latin America there is ample evidence of exchange rate depreciations after elections. Hence, we turn to the behavior of international reserves over the 1980–2005 period to investigate if exchange rates are temporarily stabilized before elections. Using annual, quarterly, and monthly data to...

While existing cross-country studies on political budget cycles rely on annual data, we build a panel with quarterly and monthly data from Latin American and OECD countries over the 1980-2005 period. Disaggregated data allow to center the electoral year more precisely, and show the effects are...

From a theoretical viewpoint, political budget cycles (PBC) arise in equilibrium when rational voters are imperfectly informed about the incumbent's competency and the incumbent enjoys discretionary power over the budget. This paper focuses on the second condition, examining how executive...