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It's politics, stupid!

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Abstract

Relying on a large sample of countries, this paper quantifies the effect of political constraints, as measured by legislative control by the incumbent government, on the size of fiscal stimulus packages that have been put in place as reaction to the Great Recession. The results suggest that on average, political constraints reduced the size of a country's fiscal stimulus packages by between 1.2 and 2.8 percentage points of GDP (depending on the stimulus measure used). This substantial effect is significant and robust to a number of alternative dependent variables and specifications. The results are thus in line with the widely held, but never tested, perception that political reality limits the de facto application of discretionary fiscal policy as reaction to negative economic shocks.

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  • Fabian Gunzinger & Jan-Egbert Sturm, 2014. "It's politics, stupid!," KOF Working papers 14-365, KOF Swiss Economic Institute, ETH Zurich.
    • Handle: RePEc:kof:wpskof:14-365
    DOI: 10.3929/ethz-a-010200330
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    File URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.3929/ethz-a-010200330
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    Cited by:

    1. Kevin Grier & Shu Lin & Haichun Ye, 2015. "Political fractionalization and delay in fiscal stabilizations: a duration analysis," Public Choice, Springer, vol. 164(1), pages 157-175, July.
    2. Shambaugh, George E. & Shen, Elaine B., 2018. "A clear advantage: The benefits of transparency to crisis recovery," European Journal of Political Economy, Elsevier, vol. 55(C), pages 391-416.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    Legislative control; Fiscal stimulus; Great Recession;
    All these keywords.

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