Who Adjusts and When? On the Political Economy of Reforms

Alberto Alesina, Silvia Ardagna and Francesco Trebbi

No 12049, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: Why do countries delay stabilizations of large and increasing budget deficits and inflation? And what explains the timing of reforms? We use the war of attrition model as a guidance for our empirical study on a vast sample of countries. We find that stabilizations are more likely to occur when time of crisis occur, at the beginning of term of office of a new government, in countries with "strong" governments (i.e. presidential systems and unified governments with a large majority of the party in office), and when the executive faces less constraints. The role of external inducements like IMF programs has at best a weak effect, but problem of reverse causality are possible.

JEL-codes: G0 H0 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2006-02
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-pbe and nep-pol
Note: EFG PE POL
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (163)

Published as Alesina, Alberto, Silvia Ardagna, and Francesco Trebbi. “Who Adjusts and When? On the Political Economy of Stabilizations.” IMF Staff Papers, Mundell-Fleming Lecture, 53: 1-49, 2006 .

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.nber.org/papers/w12049.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Who Adjusts and When?The Political Economy of Reforms (2006)
Working Paper: Who adjusts and when? On the political economy of reforms (2006)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nbr:nberwo:12049

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://www.nber.org/papers/w12049

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc National Bureau of Economic Research, 1050 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA 02138, U.S.A.. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().