164 research outputs found

    Overlapping political budget cycles in the legislative and the executive

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    We advance the literature on political budget cycles by testing separately for cycles in expenditures for elections in the legislative and the executive. Using municipal data, we can separately identify these cycles and account for general year effects. For the executive branch, we show that it is important whether the incumbent re-runs. To account for the potential endogeneity associated with this decision, we apply a unique instrumental variables approach based on age and pension eligibility rules. We find sizable and significant effects in expenditures before council elections and before joint elections when the incumbent re-runs

    Bypassing Progressive Taxation: Fraud and Base Erosion in the Spanish Income Tax (1970-2001)

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    Elliptic flow of charged particles in Pb-Pb collisions at 2.76 TeV

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    We report the first measurement of charged particle elliptic flow in Pb-Pb collisions at 2.76 TeV with the ALICE detector at the CERN Large Hadron Collider. The measurement is performed in the central pseudorapidity region (|η\eta|<0.8) and transverse momentum range 0.2< pTp_{\rm T}< 5.0 GeV/cc. The elliptic flow signal v2_2, measured using the 4-particle correlation method, averaged over transverse momentum and pseudorapidity is 0.087 ±\pm 0.002 (stat) ±\pm 0.004 (syst) in the 40-50% centrality class. The differential elliptic flow v2(pT)_2(p_{\rm T}) reaches a maximum of 0.2 near pTp_{\rm T} = 3 GeV/cc. Compared to RHIC Au-Au collisions at 200 GeV, the elliptic flow increases by about 30%. Some hydrodynamic model predictions which include viscous corrections are in agreement with the observed increase.Comment: 10 pages, 4 captioned figures, published version, figures at http://aliceinfo.cern.ch/ArtSubmission/node/389

    Vote buying or (political) business (cycles) as usual?

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    We study the short-run effect of elections on monetary aggregates in a sample of 85 low and middle income democracies (1975-2009). We find an increase in the growth rate of M1 during election months of about one tenth of a standard deviation. A similar effect can neither be detected in established OECD democracies nor in other months. The effect is larger in democracies with many poor and uneducated voters, and in Sub-Saharan Africa, Latin America, and in East-Asia and the Pacific. We argue that the election month monetary expansion is related to systemic vote buying which requires significant amounts of cash to be disbursed right before elections. The finely timed increase in M1 is consistent with this; is inconsistent with a monetary cycle aimed at creating an election time boom; and it cannot be, fully, accounted for by alternative explanations
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