Policy Myopia

This paper develops a theory of policy myopia. Policy myopia arises when rational voters set performance standards that allow elected politicians to distort the portfolio of public investments towards short-term investments. We show that the fact that voters cannot observe immediately how much politicians invested in certain types of public goods is not in itself sufficient to generate policy myopia. Policy myopia, then, arises in societies where electoral control is imperfect or in society where tax revenues cannot be committed in advance. The analysis is motivated by a number of stylized facts about public spending patterns across time and space.Myopia; public goods; electoral accountability

A Real Time Tax Smoothing Based Fiscal Policy Rule

In this paper we consider the real-time implementation of a fiscal policy rule based on tax smoothing (Barro (1979) and Bohn (1998)). We show that the tax smoothing approach, augmented by fiscal habit considerations, provides a surprisingly accurate description of US budget surplus movements. In order to investigate the robustness of the policy implications of the rule, we construct a real-time US fiscal data set, complementing the data documented by Croushore and Stark (2001). For each variable we record the different vintages, reflecting the remeasurements that occur over time. We demonstrate that the easily constructed rule provided a useful benchmark for policy analysis that is robust to real-time remeasurements.fiscal rules, tax smoothing, fiscal habits, real-time data

Real-Time Data and Fiscal Policy Analysis: A Survey of the Literature

This paper surveys the empirical research on fiscal policy analysis based on real-time data. This literature can be broadly divided in three groups that focus on: (1) the statistical properties of revisions in fiscal data; (2) the political and institutional determinants of projection errors by governments and (3) the reaction of fiscal policies to the business cycle. It emerges that, first, fiscal data revisions are large and initial releases are biased estimates of final values. Second, the presence of strong fiscal rules and institutions leads to relatively more accurate releases of fiscal data and small deviations of fiscal outcomes from government plans. Third, the cyclical stance of fiscal policies is estimated to be more ‘counter-cyclical’ when real-time data are used instead of ex-post data. Finally, more work is needed for the development of real-time datasets for fiscal policy analysis. In particular, a comprehensive real-time dataset including fiscal variables for industrialized (and possibly developing) countries, published and maintained by central banks or other institutions, is still missing