EconPapers    
Economics at your fingertips  
 

Political Cycles in OECD Economies

Nouriel Roubini and Alberto Alesina

Scholarly Articles from Harvard University Department of Economics

Abstract: This paper studies whether the dynamic behaviour of GNP growth, unemployment and inflation is systematically affected by the timing of elections and of changes of governments. The sample includes the last three decades in 18 OECD economies. We explicitly test the implication of several models of political cycles, both of the "opportunistic" and of the "partisan" type. Also, we confront the implication of recent "rational" models with more traditional approaches. Our results can be summarized as follows: (a) The "political business cycles" hypothesis, as formulated in Nordhaus (1975) on output and unemployment is generally rejected by the data; (b) inflation tends to increase immediately after elections, perhaps as a result of pre-electoral expansionary monetary and fiscal policies; (c) we find evidence of temporary partisan differences in output and unemployment and of long-run partisan differences in the inflation rate as implied by the "rational partisan theory" by Alesina (1987); (d) we find virtually no evidence of permanent partisan differences in output growth and unemployment.

Date: 1992
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (224)

Published in Review of Economic Studies

Downloads: (external link)
http://dash.harvard.edu/bitstream/handle/1/4553025/alesina_politicalcycles.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Political Cycles in OECD Economies (1992) Downloads
Working Paper: Political Cycles in OECD Economies (1990) Downloads
Working Paper: Political Cycles in OECD Economies (1990) Downloads
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:hrv:faseco:4553025

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Scholarly Articles from Harvard University Department of Economics Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Office for Scholarly Communication ().

 
Page updated 2025-03-30
Handle: RePEc:hrv:faseco:4553025