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)
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-pbe and nep-pol
Date: 2006-02
Note: EFG PE POL
View list of references View citations in EconPapers

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.nber.org/papers/w12049.pdf (application/pdf)
Access to the full text is generally limited to series subscribers, however if the top level domain of the client browser is in a developing country or transition economy free access is provided. More information about subscriptions and free access is available at http://www.nber.org/wwphelp.html.

Related works:
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: http://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nbr:nberwo:12049

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://www.nber.org/papers/w12049
The price is Paper copy available by mail.

Access Statistics for this paper

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