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Alberto Alesina, Alberto Alesina
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Comments and Discussion (2008)
Brookings Papers on Economic Activity - 2008, 1
Goodbye Europa, cronache di un declino economico e politico, Alberto Alesina, Francesco Giavazzi. . - [Milano], BUR. c2008.
The Power of the Family 1 (2006)
Alberto Alesina, Paola Giuliano
We study the importance of culture, as measured by the strenght of family ties, on economic behavior and attitudes. We define our measure of family ties using individual responses from the World...
Goodbye Europa, cronache di un declino economico e politico, Alberto Alesina, Francesco Giavazzi. . - Milano, Rizzoli, 2006.
Bureaucrats or Politicians? ∗ (2004)
Alberto Alesina, Guido Tabellini, Timothy Besley, Ro Lizzeri, Oliver Hart, Alberto Alesina, ...
was initiated while Alesina was visiting IGIER at Bocconi University; he is very grateful for the hospitality. Tabellini thanks CIAR for financial support. The views expressed herein are those of the...
Regulation and Investment (2002)
Alesina, Alberto, Ardagna, Silvia, Nicoletti, Giuseppe, Schiantarelli, Fabio
One commonly held view about the difference between continental European countries and other OECD economies, especially the United States, is that the heavy regulation of the former reduces their...
Alesina, Alberto, Barro, Robert J., Tenreyro, Silvana
As the number of independent countries increases and their economies become more integrated, we would expect to observe more multi-country currency unions. This paper explores the pros and cons for...
Alesina, Alberto, Barro, Robert J., Tenreyro, Silvana
As the number of independent countries increases and their economies become more integrated, we would expect to observe more multi-country currency unions. This paper explores the pros and cons for...
© notice, is given to the source. The Political Economy of International Unions (2001)
Alberto Alesina, Ignazio Angeloni, Federico Etro, Massimo Bordignon, Chris Foote, ...
support and acknowledges financial support from Fondazione Luigi Einaudi. The views expressed herein are those of the authors and not necessarily those of the National Bureau of Economic Research or...
Fiscal Policy, Profits, and Investment (1999)
Alesina, Alberto, Ardagna, Silvia, Perotti, Roberto, Schiantarelli, Fabio
This paper evaluates the effects of fiscal policy on investment using a panel of OECD countries. In particular, we investigate how different types of fiscal policy affect profits and , as a result,...
Income Distribution, Political Instability and Investment (1995)
Alesina, Alberto, Perotti, Roberto
This paper successfully tests on a sample of 71 countries for the period 1960-85 the following hypotheses. Income inequality, by fueling social discontent, increases socio-political instability. The...
Fiscal Expansion and Adjustments in OECD Countries (1995)
Alesina, Alberto, Perotti, Roberto
In several countries policymakers are striving to improve the budget balance. Trivially, this can be done by raising taxes and/or cutting expenditures. But the two strategies are not equivalent. In...
The Italian Budget Procedures: Analysis and Proposals (1995)
Alesina, Alberto, Mare, Mauro, Perotti, Roberto
One of the main arguments of this paper is that complexity, lack of transparency, and convoluted laws and regulations make it very difficult to handle the Italian public finances and make debt...
Economic Risk and Political Risk in Fiscal Unions (1995)
Alesina, Alberto, Perotti, Roberto
A fiscal program that redistributes income from rich to poor individuals indirectly redistributes tax revenues from regions hit by a favorable shock to regions hit by an unfavorable one. Centralized...
Reducing Budget Deficits (1995)
Alesina, Alberto, Perotti, Roberto
This paper compares the evidence concerning successful versus unsuccessful fiscal adjustments, where success is defined in terms of achieving a lasting debt reduction. The goal is to understand from...
Budget Institutions and Fiscal Performance in Latin America", OCE working paper (1995)
Alberto Alesina, Ricardo Hausmann, Rudolf Hommes, Ernesto Stein
In this paper we collect detailed information on the budget institutions of Latin American countries. We classify these institutions on a “hierarchical”/“collegial ” scale, as a function of...
Income Distribution, Political Instability and Investment (1992)
Alesina, Alberto, Perotti, Roberto
This paper successfully tests on a sample of 72 countries for the periods 1960-85 and 1970-85 the following hypotheses. Income inequality, by fueling social discontent, increases socio-political...
RULES AND DISCRETION WITH NONCOORDINATED MONETARY AND FISCAL POLICIES (1987)
ALESINA, ALBERTO, TABELLINI, GUIDO
The time inconsistency of optimal monetary policy is due to the effects of tax distortions. Thus the issue of how to improve upon the time-consistent suboptimal monetary policy is related to that of...
Alberto Alesina, Guido Tabellini
Policies are typically chosen by politicians and bureaucrats. This paper investigates the e fficiency criteria for allocating policy tasks to elected policymakers (politicians) or non elected...
Corruption, Inequality and Fairness
Alberto Alesina, George-Marios Angeletos
Bigger governments raise the possibilities for corruption; more corruption may in turn raise the support for redistributive policies that intend to correct the inequality and injustice generated by...
The Influence of Political Distortions on Economic Performance
Alberto Alesina, Brian Snowdon
Alberto Alesina is the Nathaniel Ropes Professor of Political Economy and Chairman of the Department of Economics at Harvard University. In this interview he discusses with Brian Snowdon his views on...
Work and Leisure in the U.S. and Europe: Why So Different?
Alberto Alesina, Edward L. Glaeser, Bruce Sacerdote
Americans average 25.1 working hours per person in working age per week, but the Germans average 18.6 hours. The average American works 46.2 weeks per year, while the French average 40 weeks per...
Choosing Electoral Rules: Theory and Evidence from US Cities
Philippe Aghion, Alberto Alesina, Francesco Trebbi
This paper studies the choice of electoral rules, in particular, the question of minority representation. Majorities tend to disenfranchise minorities through strategic manipulation of electoral...
Who Adjusts and When? On the Political Economy of Reforms
Alberto Alesina, Silvia Ardagna, Francesco Trebbi
Why do countries delay stabilizations of large and increasing budget deficits and inflation? And what explains the timing of reforms? We use the war of attrition model as a guidance for our empirical...
The European Union: A Politically Incorrect View
Alberto Alesina, Roberto Perotti
In this paper, we present our view of the recent evolution of European integration. We first briefly describe the main features of the institution and decision making process in the European Union,...
Ethnic Diversity and Economic Performance
Alberto Alesina, Eliana La Ferrara
We survey and assess the literature on the positive and negative effects of ethnic diversity on economic policies and outcomes. Our focus is on both focus both cities in developed countries (the US)...
Alberto Alesina, Guido Tabellini
Opportunistic politicians maximize the probability of reelection and rents from office holding. Can it be optimal from their point of view to delegate policy choices to independent bureaucracies? The...
Technology and Labor Regulations
Many low skilled jobs have been substituted away for machines in Europe, or eliminated, much more so than in the US, while technological progress at the "top," i.e., at the high-tech sector, is...
Divorce, Fertility and the Shot Gun Marriage
Alberto Alesina, Paola Giuliano
Using the birth certificates data from the Vital Statistics of the USA between 1968 and 1999, we construct state level panel data of different measures of fertility and examine the change in divorce...
Why Doesn't The US Have a European-Style Welfare State?
Alberto Alesina, Edward Glaeser, Bruce Sacerdote
European countries are much more generous to the poor relative to the US level of generosity. Economic models suggest that redistribution is a function of the variance and skewness of the pre-tax...
What Does the European Union Do?
Alberto Alesina, Ignazio Angeloni, Ludger Schuknecht
We construct a set of indicators to measure the policy-making role of the European Union (European Council, Parliament, Commission, Court of Justice, etc. ), in a selected number of policy domains....
Preferences for Redistribution in the Land of Opportunities
Alberto Alesina, Eliana La Ferrara
The poor favor redistribution and the rich oppose it, but that is not all. Social mobility may make some of today’s poor into tomorrow’s rich and since redistributive policies do not change...
War, Peace and the Size of Countries
Enrico Spolaore, Alberto Alesina
This paper studies the relationship between international con‡ict and the size distribution of countries in a model in which both peaceful bargain-ing and non-peaceful confrontations are possible....
Inequality and Happiness: Are Europeans and Americans Different?
Alberto Alesina, Rafael Di Tella, Robert MacCulloch
The answer to the question posed in the title is “yes. ” Using a total of 128,106 answers to a survey question about “happiness,” we find that there is a large, negative and significant...
The Political Economy of International Unions
Alberto Alesina, Ignazio Angeloni, Federico Etro
We model an international union as a group of countries deciding together the provision of certain public goods and policies because of spillovers. The countries are heterogeneous either in...
Institutional Rules for Federations
Alberto Alesina, Ignazio Angeloni, Federico Etro
We study the organization of federations — or international unions — which decide together the provision of certain public goods. The benefit of centralization depends on the internalization of...
Political Jurisdictions in Heterogeneous Communities
Alberto Alesina, Reza Baqir, Caroline Hoxby
We investigate the number and size of local political jurisdictions are determined, by focusing on the tradeoff between the benefits of economies of scale and the costs of a heterogeneous population....
Alberto Alesina, Robert Barro, Silvana Tenreyro
As the number of independent countries increases and their economies become more integrated, we would expect to observe more multi-country currency unions. This paper explores the pros and cons for...
Alberto Alesina, Arnaud Devleeschauwer, William Easterly, Sergio Kurlat, Romain Wacziarg
We provide new measures of ethnic, linguistic and religious fractionalization for about 190 countries. These measures are more comprehensive than those previously used in the economics literature and...
The Size of Countries: Does it Matter?
Borders are a man made institution, and as such their shape cannot be taken as part of the physical landscape. The size of countries is endogenous to politico economic forces. This paper discusses...
Fairness and Redistribution: US versus Europe
Alberto Alesina, George-Marios Angeletos
Different beliefs about how fair social competition is and what determines income inequality, influence the redistributive policy chosen democratically in a society. But the composition of income in...
Trade, Growth, and the Size of Countries
Alberto Alesina, Enrico Spolaore, Romain Wacziarg
Normally, economists take the size of countries as an exogenous variable which does need to be explained. Nevertheless, the borders of countries and therefore their size change, partially in response...
Alberto Alesina, Ignazio Angeloni, Federico Etro
We model an international union as a group of countries deciding together on the provision of public goods or policies that generate spillovers across members. The trade-off between benefits of...
Choosing (And Reneging On) Exchange Rate Regimes
Alberto Alesina, Alexander Wagner
We use data on announced and actual exchange rate arrangements to ask which countries follow de facto regimes different from their de iure ones, that is, do not do what they say. Our results suggest...
Alberto Alesina, Guido Tabellini
Policies are typically chosen by politicians and bureaucrats. This paper investigates the criteria that should lead a society to allocate policy tasks to elected policymakers (politicians) or non...
Ethnic Diversity and Economic Performance
Alberto Alesina, Eliana La Ferrara
We survey and asses the literature on the positive and negative e?ects of ethnic diversity on economic policies and outcomes. Our focus is on countries, on cities in developed countries (the US) and...
The European Union: A Politically Incorrect View
Alberto Alesina, Roberto Perotti
In this paper, we present our view of the recent evolution of European integration. We first briefly describe the main features of the institution and decision making process in the European Union,...
Choosing Electoral rules: Theory and Evidence from US Cities
Philippe Aghion, Alberto Alesina, Francesco Trebbi
This paper studies the choice of electoral rules, in particular the question of minority representation. Majorities tend to disenfranchise minorities through strategic manipulation of electoral...
Work and Leisure in the U. S. and Europe: Why so Different?
Alberto Alesina, Edward Glaeser, Bruce Sacerdote
Americans average 25. 1 working hours per person in working age per week, but the Germans average 18. 6 hours. The average American works 46. 2 weeks per year, while the French average 40 weeks per...
Corruption, Inequality and Fairness
Alberto Alesina, George-Marios Angeletos
Bigger governments raise the possibilities for corruption; more corruption may in turn raise the support for redistributive policies that intend to correct the inequality and injustice generated by...
Good bye Lenin (or not?): The effect of Communism on people's preferences
Alberto Alesina, Nicola Fuchs-Schundeln
Preferences for redistribution, as well as the generosities of welfare states, differ significantly across countries. In this paper, we test whether there exists a feedback process of the economic...
Alberto Alesina, Guido Tabellini
Opportunistic politicians maximize the probability of reelection and rents from office holding. Can it be optimal from their point of view to delegate policy choices to independent bureaucracies? The...
Why is fiscal policy often procyclical?
Alberto Alesina, Guido Tabellini
Many countries, especially developing ones, follow procyclical fiscal polices, namely spending goes up (taxes go down) in booms and spending goes down (taxes go up) in recessions. We provide an...
Who adjusts and when? On the political economy of reforms
Alberto Alesina, Silvia Ardagna, Francesco Trebbi
Why do countries delay stabilizations of large and increasing budget deficits and inflation? And what explains the timing of reforms? We use the war of attrition model as a guidance for our empirical...
Alberto Alesina, William Easterly, Janina Matuszeski
Artificial states are those in which political borders do not coincide with a division of nationalities desired by the people on the ground. We propose and compute for all countries in the world two...
Divorce, fertility and the shot gun marriage
Alberto Alesina, Paola Giuliano
Using the birth certificates data from the Vital Statistics of the USA between 1968 and 1999, we construct state level panel data of different measures of fertility and examine the change in divorce...
Who Adjusts and When?The Political Economy of Reforms
Alberto Alesina, Silvia Ardagna, Francesco Trebbi
Why do countries delay stabilizations of large and increasing budget deficits and inflation? And what explains the timing of reforms? We use the war-of-attrition model to guide our empirical study on...
An Overlapping Generations Model of Electoral Competition
Alberto Alesina, Stephen E. Spear
This paper presents a dynamic model of political competition between two "parties" with different policy preferences. A "party" is explicitly modeled as a sequence of overlapping generations of...
Alberto Alesina, Alex Cukierman
Politicians have generally two motives: they wish to hold office as long as possible and wish to implement their preferred policies. Thus they face a trade-off between the policies which maximize...
External Debt, Capital Flight and Political Risk
Alberto Alesina, Guido Tabellini
This paper provides an explanation of the simultaneous occurrence of large accumulation of external debt, private capital outflow and relatively low domestic capital formation in developing...
Public Confidence and Debt Management: A Model and A Case Study of Italy
Alberto Alesina, Alessandro Prati, Guido Tabellini
High debt countries may face the risk of self-fulfilling debt crises. If the public expects that in the future the government will be unable to roll over the maturing debt, they may refuse to buy...
Political Instability and Economic Growth
Alberto Alesina, Sule Ozler, Nouriel Roubini, Phillip Swagel
This paper investigates the relationship between political instability and per capita GDP growth in a sample of 113 countries for the period 1950-1982. We define ?political instability? as the...
Partisan Cycles in Congressional Elections and the Macroeconomy
Alberto Alesina, Howard Rosenthal
The post-war United States exhibits two rather strong politico-economic regularities. The political regularity is that the party of the President has always lost votes in aid-term Congressional...
Alberto Alesina, Guido Tabellini
This paper analyzes a model in which different rational individuals vote over the composition and time profile of public spending. Potential disagreement between current and future majorities...
Alberto Alesina, Howard Rosenthal
This paper extends the spatial theory of voting to an institutional structure in which policy choices are a function of the composition of the legislature and of the executive. In an insti tutional...
Democracy, Technology, and Growth
Philippe Aghion, Alberto Alesina, Francesco Trebbi
We explore the question of how political institutions and particularly democracy affect economic growth. Although empirical evidence of a positive effect of democracy on economic performance in the...
What Does the European Union Do?
Alberto Alesina, Ignazio Angeloni, Ludger Schuknecht
Treaty on European Union; political economy; subsidiarity; fiscal federalism
Alberto Alesina, Ignazio Angeloni, Federico Etro
We model an international union as a group of countries deciding to centralize the provision of public goods, or policies, that generate externalities across union members. The trade-off between the...
Alberto Alesina, George-Marios Angeletos
Different beliefs about the fairness of social competition and what determines income inequality influence the redistributive policy chosen in a society. But the composition of income in equilibrium...
Fiscal Policy, Profits, and Investment
Alberto Alesina, Silvia Ardagna, Roberto Perotti, Fabio Schiantarelli
This paper evaluates the effects of fiscal policy on investment using a panel of OECD countries. We find a sizeable negative effect of public spending—and in particular of its wage component—on...
The Welfare State and Competitiveness.
Alesina, Alberto, Perotti, Roberto
In all industrial countries, fiscal policy is increasingly about redistribution. In this paper, the authors study redistribution across different types of agents in a world characterized by the...
The Political Economy of the Budget Surplus in the United States
Current surpluses in the U.S. have been achieved by a combination of a strong economy, low interest rates, and sharp cuts in defense spending. These surpluses follow a period (the 1980s) of rather...
Political models of macroeconomic policy and fiscal reform
The author explains how recent developments in political economics improve our understanding of macroeconomic policy - especially the timing, design, and likelihood of stabilization's success through...
Goodbye Lenin (or Not?): The Effect of Communism on People
Alberto Alesina, Nicola Fuchs-Schündeln
Preferences for redistribution, as well as the generosity of welfare states, differ significantly across countries. This paper tests whether there exists a feedback process of the economic regime on...
Gender Based Taxation and the Division of Family Chores
Alberto Alesina, Andrea Ichino, Loukas Karabarbounis
Gender Based Taxation (GBT) satisfies Ramsey’s optimal criterion by taxing less the more elastic labor supply of (married) women. This holds when different elasticities between men and women are...
Bureaucrats or Politicians? Part I: A Single Policy Task
Alberto Alesina, Guido Tabellini
This paper investigates the normative criteria that guide the allocation of a policy task to an elected politician versus an independent bureaucrat. The bureaucrat is preferable for technical tasks...
A Theory of Divided Government.
Alesina, Alberto, Rosenthal, Howard
This paper extends the spatial theory of voting to the case in which policy choices depend upon the interaction between executive and the legislature. Voters are strategic and to analyze equilibrium...
Economic Integration and Political Disintegration
Alberto Alesina, Enrico Spolaore, Romain Wacziarg
In a world of trade restrictions, large countries enjoy economic benefits, because political boundaries determine the size of the market. Under free trade and global markets even relatively small...
Tabellini, Guido, Alesina, Alberto
This paper analyzes a model in which a group of rational individuals votes over the composition and time profile of public spending. All voters agree that a balanced budget is ex ante optimal....
Ethnic Diversity and Economic Performance
Alberto Alesina, Eliana La Ferrara
We survey and assess the literature on the positive and negative effects of ethnic diversity on economic policies and outcomes. Our focus is on communities of different size and organizational...
The European Union: A Politically Incorrect View
Alberto Alesina, Roberto Perotti
In this paper, we present our view of the recent evolution of European integration. We first briefly describe the main features of the institution and decision making process in the European Union,...
Alberto Alesina, Paola Giuliano
The structure of family relationships influences economic behavior and attitudes. We define our measure of family ties using individual responses from the World Value Survey regarding the role of the...
The Political Economy of Growth: A Critical Survey of the Recent Literature.
Alesina, Alberto, Perotti, Roberto
This article reviews the recent literature on the political economy of growth, focusing on the research that has developed at the intersection of the endogenous growth literature and the new...
The Political Economy of Budget Deficits
Alberto Alesina, Roberto Perotti
Political economy , Budget deficits , Budgetary policy , Debt , Economic models ,
Budget Deficits and Budget Institutions
Alberto Alesina, Roberto Perotti
Budget deficits , Budgetary policy ,
Fiscal Adjustments in OECD Countries - Composition and Macroeconomic Effects
Alberto Alesina, Roberto Perotti
Fiscal policy , Developed countries ,
Redistribution Through Public Employment - The Case of Italy
Alberto Alesina, Massimo V. Rostagno, Stephan Danninger
Public sector , Italy , Employment ,
Rules and Discretion with Noncoordinated Monetary and Fiscal Policies.
Alesina, Alberto, Tabellini, Guido
The time inconsistency of optimal monetary policy is due to the effects of tax distortions. Thus, the issue of how to im prove upon the time-consistent suboptimal monetary policy is related to that...
Wacziarg, Romain, Alesina, Alberto, Devleeschauwer, Arnaud, Easterly, William, Kurlat, Sergio
We provide new measures of ethnic, linguistic and religious fractionalization for about 190 countries. These measures are more comprehensive than those previously used in the economics literature and...
Bureaucrats or politicians? Part II: Multiple policy tasks
Alesina, Alberto, Tabellini, Guido
Policies are typically chosen by politicians and bureaucrats. This paper investigates first the normative criteria with which to allocate policy tasks to elected policymakers (politicians) or...
Segregation and the Quality of Government in a Cross-Section of Countries
Alberto Alesina, Ekaterina Zhuravskaya
This paper has three goals. The first (and perhaps the most important one) is to provide a new compilation of data on ethnic, linguistic and religious composition at the sub-national level for a...
Fiscal Adjustment, The Real Exchange Rate and Australia's External Imbalance
Alberto Alesina, Matthew T. Jones
This article examines issues of relevance to Australia's external imbalance. We investigate the sharp fiscal consolidation over the past five years and examine why it did not reduce the current...
Why is Fiscal Policy Often Procyclical?
Alberto Alesina, Filipe R. Campante, Guido Tabellini
Fiscal policy is procyclical in many developing countries. We explain this policy failure with a political agency problem. Procyclicality is driven by voters who seek to "starve the Leviathan" to...
Alberto Alesina, Silvia Ardagna, Giuseppe Nicoletti, Fabio Schiantarelli
One commonly held view about the difference between continental European countries and other OECD countries, especially the United States, is that the heavy regulation of Europe reduces its growth....
Welfare Policies in the UNECE Region: Why so Different?
This paper provides the text of the Gunnar Myrdal Lecture presented at the U.N. Palais des Nations in 2006. It provides an analysis of why different countries in the western world have chosen...
Political Parties and the Business Cycle in the United States, 1948-1984
Alberto Alesina, Jeffrey Sachs
This paper tests the existence and the extent of a politically induced business cycle in the U.S. in the post-World War II period. The cycle described in this paper is different from the traditional...
A Positive Theory of Fiscal Deficits and Government Debt in a Democracy
Alberto Alesina, Guido Tabellini
This paper considers an economy in which policymakers with different preferences concerning fiscal policy alternate in office as a result of democratic elections. It is shown that in this situation...
Why are Stabilizations Delayed?
When a stabilization has significant distributional implications (as in the case of tax increases to eliminate a large budget deficit) different socio-economic groups will attempt to shift the burden...
Political Cycles in OECD Economies
Alberto Alesina, Nouriel Roubini
This paper studies whether the dynamic behavior of GNP growth, unemployment and inflation is systematically affected by the timing of elections and of changes of governments. The sample includes the...
A Model of the Political Economy of the United States
Alberto Alesina, John Londregan, Howard Rosenthal
We develop and test a model of joint determination of the rate of economic growth and the results of presidential and Congressional elections in the United States. In our model, economic agents and...
Why Are There So Many Divided Senate Delegations?
Alberto Alesina, Morris Fiorina, Howard Rosenthal
The last three decades have witnessed a sharp increase in the number of states with spilt Senate delegations, featuring two senators of different parties. In addition, there is evidence that senators...
Distributive Politics and Economic Growth
This paper studies the relationship between political conflict and economic growth in a simple model of endogenous growth with distributive conflicts. We study both the case of two "classes" (workers...
Macroeconomic Policy and Elections in OECD Democracies
Alberto Alesina, Gerald D. Cohen, Nouriel Roubini
The purpose of this paper is to test for evidence of opportunistic "political business cycles" in a large sample of 18 OECD economies. Our results can be summarized as follows: 1) We find very little...
The European Central Bank: Reshaping Monetary Politics in Europe
Alberto Alesina, Vittorio Grilli
This paper studies how the creation of a European Central Bank (ECB) will change the political economy of monetary policy in Europe. The twelve governors of the national Central Banks of the EEC have...
Menus of Linear Income Tax Schedules
Alberto Alesina, Philippe Weil
Relative to traditional piecewise linear income taxation schemes, it is possible to increase government revenues by offering to consumers a menu of linear income tax schedules. In the resulting...
On the Feasibility of a One or Multi-Speed European Monetary Union
Alberto Alesina, Vittorio Grilli
This paper addresses two questions: (1) Is a twelve country monetary union in Europe feasible; (2) Can monetary union be achieved at multi-speed, i.e., with a rust group of countries going first, and...
The Political Economy of Capital Controls
Alberto Alesina, Vittorio Grilli
This paper calculates international income transfers which implement a Pareto optimal trade equilibrium in a world where many countries trade many goods.
Income Distribution, Political Instability, and Investment
Alberto Alesina, Roberto Perotti
This paper successfully tests on a sample of 70 countries for the period 1960-85 the following hypotheses. Income inequality, by fueling social discontent, increases socio-political instability. The...
The Political Economy of Budget Deficits
Alberto Alesina, Roberto Perotti
This paper provides a critical survey of the literature on politico-institutional determinants of the government budget. We organize our discussion around two questions: Why did certain OECD...
The Welfare State and Competitiveness
Alberto Alesina, Roberto Perotti
In all modern industrial countries, redistributive expenditures are a larger component of the government budget than consumption of goods and services. In this paper, we use a general equilibrium,...
Economic Risk and Political Risk in Fiscal Unions
Alberto Alesina, Roberto Perotti
A fiscal program that redistributes income from rich to poor individuals indirectly redistributes tax revenues from regions hit by a favorable shock to regions hit by an unfavorable one. Centralized...
On the Number and Size of Nations
Alberto Alesina, Enrico Spolaore
This paper studies the equilibrium determination of the number of political jurisdictions in different political regimes, democratic or not, and in different economic environments, with more or less...
Fiscal Expansions and Fiscal Adjustments in OECD Countries
Alberto Alesina, Roberto Perotti
This paper considers budget expansions and adjustments in OECD countries in the last three decades. Our main results are: i) on average fiscal expansions are the results of increases in expenditures,...
Budget Deficits and Budget Institutions
Alberto Alesina, Roberto Perotti
By discussing the available theoretical and empirical literature, this paper argues that budget procedures and budget institutions do influence budget outcomes. Budget institutions include both...
Budget Institutions and Fiscal Performance in Latin America
Alberto Alesina, Ricardo Hausmann, Rudolf Hommes, Ernesto Stein
In this paper we collect detailed information on the budget institutions of Latin American countries. We classify these institutions on a `hierarchical'/'collegial' scale, as a function of their...
The Costs and Benefits of Fiscal Rules: Evidence from U.S. States
Alberto Alesina, Tamim Bayoumi
This paper shows that in American states balanced budget rules are effective in enforcing fiscal discipline but they have no costs in terms of increased output variability. More specifically, we show...
International Conflict, Defense Spending and the Size of Countries
Alberto Alesina, Enrico Spolaore
This paper provides a formal model of endogenous country formation and of choice of defense spending in a world with international conflict. The model is consistent with three observations. First,...
Fiscal Adjustments in OECD Countries: Composition and Macroeconomic Effects
Alberto Alesina, Roberto Perotti
This ppaer studies how the composition of fiscal adjustments influences their likelihood of success, defined as a long lasting deficit reduction, and their macroeconomic consequences. We find that...
Public Goods and Ethnic Divisions
Alberto Alesina, Reza Baqir, William Easterly
We present a model that links heterogeneity of preferences across ethnic groups in a city to the amount and type of public good the city supplies. We test the implications of the model with three...
Openness, Country Size and the Government
Alberto Alesina, Romain Wacziarg
This paper shows that smaller countries have larger public sectors as a share of GDP, and are also more open to trade. These empirical observations are consistent with recent theoretical models...
Economic Integration and Political Disintegration
Alberto Alesina, Enrico Spolaore, Romain Wacziarg
Trade liberalization and political separatism go hand in hand. In a world of trade restrictions, large countries enjoy economic benefits because political boundaries determine the size of the market....
Who Gives Foreign Aid to Whom and Why?
This paper studies the pattern of allocation of foreign aid from various donors to receiving countries. We find considerable evidence that the direction of foreign aid is dictated by political and...
Redistributive Public Employment
Alberto Alesina, Reza Baqir, William Easterly
Politicians may use disguised' redistributive policies in order to circumvent opposition to explicit tax-transfer schemes. First, we present a theoretical model that formalizes this hypothesis; then...
Alberto Alesina, Romain Wacziarg
This paper examines the process of European political integration. We start with a political economy model of monetary policy, illustrating a general principle: economic integration requires setting...
Do Corrupt Governments Receive Less Foreign Aid?
Alberto Alesina, Beatrice Weder
Critics of foreign aid programs argue that these funds often support corrupt governments and inefficient bureaucracies. Supporters argue that foreign aid can be used to reward good governments. This...
Participation in Heterogeneous Communities
Alberto Alesina, Eliana La Ferrara
This paper studies both theoretically and empirically the determinants of group formation and of the degree of participation when the population is heterogeneous, both in terms of income and race or...
Fiscal Policy, Profits, and Investment
Alberto Alesina, Silvia Ardagna, Roberto Perotti, Fabio Schiantarelli
This paper evaluates the effects of fiscal policy on investment using a panel of OECD countries. In particular, we investigate how different types of fiscal policy affect profits and , as a result,...
Redistribution Through Public Employment: The Case of Italy
Alberto Alesina, Stephan Danninger, Massimo Rostagno
This paper examines the regional distribution of public employment in Italy. It documents two sets of facts. This first is the use of public employment as a subsidy from the North to the less wealthy...
The Political Economy of the Budget Surplus in the U.S.
Current surpluses in the U.S. have been achieved by a combination of a strong economy, low interest rates, and sharp cuts in defence spending. These surpluses follow a period (the eighties) of rather...
Alberto Alesina, Eliana La Ferrara
Both individual experiences and community characteristics influence how much people trust each other. Using data drawn from US localities we find that the strongest factors that reduce trust are: i)...
Political Jurisdictions in Heterogeneous Communities
Alberto Alesina, Reza Baqir, Caroline Hoxby
We investigate how the number and size of local political jurisdictions in an area is determined. Our model focuses on the tradeoff between the benefits of economies of scale and the costs of a...
Alberto Alesina, Robert J. Barro
What is the optimal number of currencies in the world? Common currencies affect trading costs and, thereby, the amounts of trade, output, and consumption. From the perspective of monetary policy, the...
Inequality and Happiness: Are Europeans and Americans Different?
Alberto Alesina, Rafael Di Tella, Robert MacCulloch
The answer to the question posed in the title is 'yes.' Using a total of 128,106 answers to a survey question about happiness,' we find that there is a large, negative and significant effect of...
Preferences for Redistribution in the Land of Opportunities
Alberto Alesina, Eliana La Ferrara
The poor favor redistribution and the rich oppose it, but that is not all. Social mobility may make some of today's poor into tomorrow's rich and since redistributive policies do not change often,...
Why Doesn't the US Have a European-Style Welfare System?
Alberto Alesina, Edward Glaeser, Bruce Sacerdote
European countries are much more generous to the poor relative to the US level of generosity. Economic models suggest that redistribution is a function of the variance and skewness of the pre-tax...
The Political Economy of International Unions
Alberto Alesina, Ignazio Angeloni, Federico Etro
We model an international union as a group of countries deciding together the provision of certain public goods and policies because of spillovers. The countries are heterogeneous either in...
Institutional Rules for Federations
Alberto Alesina, Ignazio Angeloni, Federico Etro
We study the organization of federations - or international unions - which decide together the provision of certain public goods. The benefit of centralization depends on the internalization of the...
What Does the European Union Do?
Alberto Alesina, Ignazio Angeloni, Ludger Schuknecht
We construct a set of indicators to measure the policy-making role of the European Union (European Council, Parliament, Commission, Court of Justice, etc.), in a selected number of policy domains....
Endogenous Political Institutions
Philippe Aghion, Alberto Alesina, Francesco Trebbi
Political institutions influence economic policy, but they are themselves endogenous since they are chosen, in some way, by members of the polity. An important aspect of institutional design is how...
Alberto Alesina, Robert J. Barro, Silvana Tenreyro
As the number of independent countries increases and their economies become more integrated, we would expect to observe more multi-country currency unions. This paper explores the pros and cons for...
Alberto Alesina, Arnaud Devleeschauwer, William Easterly, Sergio Kurlat, Romain Wacziarg
We provide new measures of ethnic, linguistic and religious fractionalization for about 190 countries. These measures are more comprehensive than those previously used in the economics literature and...
Fairness and Redistribution: U.S. versus Europe
Alberto Alesina, George-Marios Angeletos
Different beliefs about how fair social competition is and what determines income inequality, influence the redistributive policy chosen democratically in a society. But the composition of income in...
Alberto Alesina, Silvia Ardagna, Giuseppe Nicoletti, Fabio Schiantarelli
One commonly held view about the difference between continental European countries and other OECD economies, especially the United States, is that the heavy regulation of Europe reduces its growth....
Choosing (and reneging on) exchange rate regimes
Alberto Alesina, Alexander Wagner
We use data on announced and actual exchange rate arrangements to ask which countries follow de facto regimes different from their de iure ones, that is, do not do what they say. Our results suggest...
Why is Fiscal Policy Often Procyclical?
Alberto Alesina, Guido Tabellini
Many countries, especially developing ones, follow procyclical fiscal polices, namely spending goes up (taxes go down) in booms and spending goes down (taxes go up) in recessions. We provide an...
Good bye Lenin (or not?): The Effect of Communism on People's Preferences
Alberto Alesina, Nichola Fuchs Schuendeln
Preferences for redistribution, as well as the generosities of welfare states, differ significantly across countries. In this paper, we test whether there exists a feedback process of the economic...
Alberto Alesina, William Easterly, Janina Matuszeski
Artificial states are those in which political borders do not coincide with a division of nationalities desired by the people on the ground. We propose and compute for all countries in the world two...
Divorce, Fertility and the Shot Gun Marriage
Alberto Alesina, Paola Giuliano
Total fertility declined in states that introduced unilateral divorce, which makes dissolution of marriage easier. Also the ratio of out-of-wedlock fertility over total declined. We suggest an...
Alberto Alesina, Paola Giuliano
The structure of family relationships influences economic behavior and attitudes. We define our measure of family ties using individual responses from the World Value Survey regarding the role of the...
Gender Based Taxation and the Division of Family Chores
Alberto Alesina, Andrea Ichino, Loukas Karabarbounis
Gender Based Taxation (GBT) satisfies Ramsey's optimal criterion by taxing less the more elastic labor supply of women. This holds when different elasticities between men and women are taken as...
Political Jurisdictions in Heterogeneous Communities
Alberto Alesina, Reza Baqir, Caroline Hoxby
We investigate whether political jurisdictions form in response to the trade-off between economies of scale and the costs of a heterogeneous population. We consider heterogeneity in income, race,...
Segregation and the Quality of Government in a Cross-Section of Countries
Alberto Alesina, Ekaterina Zhuravskaya
This paper has three goals. The first, and perhaps the most important, is to provide a new compilation of data on ethnic, linguistic and religious composition at the sub-national level for a large...
Europas Bankenkrise : ein Aufruf zum Handeln
Alberto Alesina, Richard Baldwin, Tito Boeri, Willem Buiter, Francesco Giavazzi, Daniel Gros, ...
The Euro and Structural Reforms
Alberto Alesina, Silvia Ardagna, Vincenzo Galasso
This paper investigates whether or not the adoption of the Euro has facilitated the introduction of structural reforms, defined as deregulation in the product markets and liberalization and...
The Euro and Structural Reforms
Alberto Alesina, Silvia Ardagna, Vincenzo Galasso
This paper investigates whether or not the adoption of the Euro has facilitated the introduction of structural reforms, defined as deregulation in the product markets and liberalization and...
Preferences for Redistribution
Alesina, Alberto, Giuliano, Paola
This paper discusses what determines the preferences of individuals for redistribution. We review the theoretical literature and provide a framework to incorporate various effects previously studied...
Ethnic Diversity and Economic Performance
Alberto Alesina, Eliana La Ferrara
We survey and assess the literature on the positive and negative effects of ethnic diversity on economic policies and outcomes. Our focus is on communities of different size and organizational...
Institutional Reforms: The Case of Colombia
These studies of Colombian economic, political, and social institutions offer not only theoretically grounded analyses but also practical recommendations for policy reform. Experts from the United...
Political Cycles and the Macroeconomy
Alberto Alesina, Nouriel Roubini, Gerald D. Cohen
The relationship between political and economic cycles is one of the most widely studied topics in political economics. This book examines how electoral laws, the timing of elections, the ideological...
Family Ties and Political Participation
Alesina, Alberto, Giuliano, Paola
We establish an inverse relationship between family ties, generalized trust and political participation. The more individuals rely on the family as a provider of services, insurance, transfer of...
Verfassung, Wahlsystem, Politische Partei, Constitution, Electoral system , Political party
The evolution of ideology, fairness and redistribution
Alberto Alesina, Guido Cozzi, Noemi Mantovan
Ideas about what is "fair" above and beyond the individuals' position in the income ladder determine preferences for redistribution. We study the dynamic evolution of different economies in which...