Temporal Aggregation in Political Budget Cycles
Serie Documentos de Trabajo, No. 403
39 Pages Posted: 10 Oct 2009
Date Written: August 1, 2009
Abstract
While existing cross-country studies on political budget cycles rely on annual data, we build a panel with quarterly and monthly data from Latin American and OECD countries over the 1980-2005 period. Disaggregated data allow to center the electoral year more precisely, and show the effects are concentrated in a three-quarter window around elections. Cycles are statistically significant only in Latin America, but the pattern is similar to OECD countries: the budget surplus/GDP ratio falls in the election period and rises in the post-election period. In line with the logic of rational opportunistic manipulation, these effects cancel out.
Keywords: temporal aggregation, electoral window, pre- and post-electoral effects, political budget cycles, rational opportunistic cycles
JEL Classification: D72, D78, H60
Suggested Citation: Suggested Citation
Do you have a job opening that you would like to promote on SSRN?
Recommended Papers
-
Political Budget Cycles in New Versus Established Democracies
By Adi Brender and Allan Drazen
-
Political Budget Cycles in New Versus Established Democracies
By Adi Brender and Allan Drazen
-
Political Business Cycles and Expenditure Policies in Developing Countries
-
Opportunistic Political Cycles: Test in a Young Democracy Setting
By Akhmed Akhmedov, Alexei Ravichev, ...
-
Fiscal Transparency, Political Parties, and Debt in OECD Countries
By David Dreyer Lassen and James E. Alt
-
Conditional Political Budget Cycles
By Min Shi and Jakob Svensson
-
By Adi Brender and Allan Drazen