When Do You Get Economists as Policy-Makers?
47 Pages Posted: 21 Dec 2012 Last revised: 16 Jan 2018
Date Written: January 14, 2018
Abstract
We analyze when economists become top-level “economic policy-makers,” focusing on financial crises and the partisanship of a country’s leader. We present a new dataset of the educational and occupational background of 1200 political leaders, finance ministers, and central bank governors from 40 developed democracies from 1973 to 2010. We find that left leaders appoint economic policy-makers who are more highly trained in economics and finance ministers who are less likely to have private finance backgrounds but more likely to be former central bankers. Finance ministers appointed during financial crises are less likely to have a financial services background. A leader’s exposure to economics training is also related to appointments. This suggests one crucial mechanism for affecting economic policy is through the selection of certain types of economic policy-makers.
Keywords: financial crisis, finance ministry, central bank, finance, fiscal policy, monetary policy, partisanship
Suggested Citation: Suggested Citation
Do you have a job opening that you would like to promote on SSRN?
Recommended Papers
-
Exposing Corrupt Politicians: The Effects of Brazil's Publicly Released Audits on Electoral Outcomes
By Claudio Ferraz and Frederico Finan
-
Democratization, Decentralization and the Distribution of Local Public Goods in a Poor Rural Economy
-
Political Selection and the Quality of Government: Evidence from South India
By Timothy J. Besley, Rohini Pande, ...
-
Political Selection and the Quality of Government: Evidence from South India
By Timothy J. Besley, Rohini Pande, ...
-
Political Selection and the Quality of Government: Evidence from South India
By Timothy J. Besley, Rohini Pande, ...
-
Political Selection and the Quality of Government: Evidence from South India
By Timothy J. Besley, Rohini Pande, ...
-
The Impact of Political Leaders' Profession and Education on Reforms
By Axel Dreher, Michael J. Lamla, ...
-
By Scott Gehlbach, Konstantin Sonin, ...
-
Businessman Candidates: Special-Interest Politics in Weakly Institutionalized Environments
By Scott Gehlbach and Konstantin Sonin