American politics have been characterized by a high degree of partisan conflict in recent years. Combined with a divided government, this has led not only to significant Congressional gridlock, but also to spells of high fiscal policy uncertainty. The unusually slow recovery from the Great...

We study how cross-country macroeconomic spillovers caused by sovereign default affect equilibrium bailouts. Because of portfolio diversification, the default of one country causes a macroeconomic contraction also in other countries. This generates a self-interest for these other countries to...

This paper studies the effects of asymmetries in re-election probabilities across parties on public policy and its subsequent propagation to the economy. The struggle between opposing groups – that disagree on the composition of public consumption – results in governments being endogenously...

Standard real business cycle theory predicts that consumption should be smoother than output, as observed in developed countries. In emerging economies, however, consumption is more volatile than income. In this paper the authors provide a novel explanation of this phenomenon, the ‘consumption...