Politics and Business Cycles in Industrial Democracies
探讨政治竞争如何影响宏观经济政策，发现党派政策制定在工业国家中普遍存在，而选举周期的影响相对有限，并指出政治制度稳定性和央行独立性对宏观经济结果有重要影响。
Politics Alberto Alesina Influences from political competition on macroeconomic policy are often thought to be a source of economic fluctuations. Politicians are described as being driven by two, not mutually exclusive, main motivations: they want to be reelected and they harbour political, or ideological, biases. When such theories are confronted with actual cycles in a number of industrial countries, the pattern of inflation, unemployment, output, and budget deficits indicates that partisan policy making is a fairly widespread phenomenon, with more limited evidence that electoral preoccupations result in major fluctuations. The combination of partisanship and electoral cycles may easily result in socially undesirable outcomes. In particular the degree of politico-institutional stability and the independence of the Central Bank have a bearing on macroeconomic outcomes. These observations raise a number of important questions about the design of political institutions.