The recent financial crisis was characterized by the sizeable fiscal cost of banking sector bail out operations and the significant automatic and discretionary fiscal policy response to shrinking output, which have put increased pressure on public finances in many industrialized countries. This...

Most party systems have seen a considerable rise in polarization during the past decades. We show that fiscal policies have contributed to this development. Our macro-level analysis of 166 elections since 1980 finds that austerity increases both electoral abstention and votes for non-mainstream...

As the world economy slowly recovers from the very deep and widespread recession of recent years, many countries confront very serious fiscal imbalances. How much time they have to deal with these imbalances is a central question, the salience of which can only have been increased by the ongoing...

Austerity is a concept that is often used in the public debate. It refers to fiscal policy measures that reduce government spending and raise taxes for the purposes of closing a government budget deficit. This paper analyzes the concept in the context of the current European economic crisis and...

IMF praised the Turkish financial system for escaping the 2008 global financial crisis with a minor dent in its economy, the success was attributable to significant capital buffers built up in the aftermath of the 2001 economic crisis, more effective fiscal and monetary management, strengthened...

After the 2009 global recession, many papers identified a non-linear inverted U-shaped relationship between economic growth and sovereign debt. However, their results are mixed regarding the exact turning point and, recently, the direction of its causality. According the traditional view, we...

Emerging market and developing economies have experienced recurrent episodes of rapid debt accumulation over the past fifty years. This paper examines the consequences of debt accumulation using a three-pronged approach: an event study of debt accumulation episodes in 100 emerging market and...

Emerging market and developing economies have experienced recurrent episodes of rapid debt accumulation over the past fifty years. This paper examines the consequences of debt accumulation using a three-pronged approach: an event study of debt accumulation episodes in 100 emerging market and...

We examine a large set of economic, sociopolitical, and institutional variables in a panel of 57 developed and developing countries over the period of 1970-90 to derive robust conclusions about which variables are important in explaining cross-country differences in public sector deficits....

We examine a large set of economic, sociopolitical, and institutional variables in a panel of 57 developed and developing countries over the period of 1970-90 to derive robust conclusions about which variables are important in explaining cross-country differences in public sector deficits....