A economia da política reabilitada: a formação e as controvérsias da teoria dos ciclos político-econômicos

Rafael Galvão De Almeida

No 618, Textos para Discussão Cedeplar-UFMG from Cedeplar, Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais

Abstract: Research in political business cycles is part of a larger program related to the economic analysis of politics with a macroeconomic focus, named New Political Macroeconomics. This article explores the historical evolution of the political business cycle literature, starting from the early writers on the topic (Kalecki, 1943; Åkerman, 1947). It then highlights the importance of Nordhaus (1975) for the theory. Elaborating the first theoretical model with empirical verification for the political business cycle, Nordhaus transformed a problem that was usually seen as microeconomic into a macroeconomic issue. Research flourished for a while, but the model underwent criticism because of its assumptions about voters, lack of definitive empirical verification, and because it did not conform to the tenets of rational expectations, thus causing interest in PBC models to wane. The latter went through a comeback after adapting to rational expectations (Rogoff, Siebert, 1988), and the formalization of conditional political business cycle models “solved” the problem of empirical verification, by arguing that political business cycles need specific conditions to happen. The paper concludes by reaffirming the importance of political business cycle models in creating a tradition that allowed the analysis with macroeconomic tools the issues of collective decision-making, previously a domain solely microeconomic.

Keywords: political business cycle; political economy; public choice; new political macroeconomics; William Nordhaus (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 25 pages
Date: 2020-02
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-his, nep-hpe, nep-mac and nep-pol
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.cedeplar.ufmg.br/pesquisas/td/TD%20618.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
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:cdp:texdis:td618

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
Cedeplar-FACE-UFMG Av. Antonio Carlos, 6627 Belo Horizonte, MG 31270-901 Brazil

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Textos para Discussão Cedeplar-UFMG from Cedeplar, Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais Cedeplar-FACE-UFMG Av. Antonio Carlos, 6627 Belo Horizonte, MG 31270-901 Brazil. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Gustavo Britto ().