Although pre-electoral political manipulation of the budget --- the political budget cycle (PBC) --- has been long investigated by scholars, empirical findings are mixed at best. This is partly because of the non-random nature of election timing. There also exist ongoing debates over how the...

This paper evaluates the dynamics of small group persuasion within a large scale randomized deliberative experiment, in particular whether persuasion in this context is driven by the ideological composition of small groups, to which participants were randomly assigned. In these discussions...

We propose a new method to measure persuasion within small groups, and apply this method to a large scale randomized deliberative experiment. We define persuasion as the systematic component of an individual's preference change that is due to discursive interpersonal interaction, and we measure...

According to the expectations channel, a fiscal consolidation may give rise to less contractionary, or even expansionary effects on consumption, despite a decline in current disposable income. Intuitively, people may accumulate a stock of savings in anticipation of the consolidation and may...

The paper presents an agent based model to study the possible effects of different fiscal and monetary policies in the context of debt deflation. We introduce a modified Taylor rule which includes the financial position of firms as a target. Monte Carlo simulations show that an excessive...