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In this imaginary dialogue, a populist and an economist discuss the role of economic shocks to explain populism. A simple correlation between economic shocks and populism is weak. However, economic shocks can explain well the phenomenon of populism in countries with low pre-existent level of trust. This is confirmed both at the macro cross-country level and also by micro evidence obtained from surveys. Finally, this finding is consistent with the “ideational approach” in political science, which emphasizes how the populist narrative opposes the “corrupt elite” to the “virtuous people.”
This paper analyzes market reactions to the 2013-14 Fed announcements related to the tapering of asset purchases and examines how these reactions are influenced by financial depth. The study focuses on long-term government bond yields and uses daily data for all emerging markets. Controlling for all time-invariant country characteristics as well as time-varying macroeconomic fundamentals (changes in current account, fiscal balance, GDP growth, and inflation), countries with deeper domestic financial markets (as measured by higher bank credit, M2, M3, or stock market capitalization) experienced smaller increases in government bond yields during four-day windows around Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) announcements related to tapering. Countries with better macroeconomic fundamentals (measured by improvements in current account, fiscal balance, and GDP growth) also experienced smaller increases in government bond yields around such episodes.
How does information supplied by firms influence policy? How efficient is legislative bargaining within Congress? To answer these questions, this paper studies the political influence of individual firms on Congressional decisions to suspend tariffs on U.S. imports of intermediate goods. We develop a model of legislative bargaining in which firms influence legislators by transmitting information about the value of protection, using verbal messages and lobbying expenditures. We estimate our model using firm-level data on tariff suspension bills and lobbying expenditures from 1999-2006. We find that, controlling for lobbying expenditures, an increase in the number of import-competing firms expressing opposition to a suspension significantly reduces the probability of the suspension being granted, suggesting that firm messages do indeed contain policy-relevant information. We further find that lobbying expenditures by proponent and opponent firms sway this probability in opposite directions. The effect of the number of opponents is significantly larger than that of both opponent and proponent lobbying. We estimate that the greater information content of verbal opposition fully accounts for its larger impact relative to opponent lobbying and explains about three quarters of its greater effect relative to proponent lobbying, with the remaining one quarter explained by legislative bargaining costs.
We examine the strength of monetary transmission in India, using a conventional structural VAR methodology. We find that a tightening of monetary policy is associated with a significant increase in bank lending rates and conventional effects on the exchange rate, though pass-through to lending rates is only partial and exchange rate effects are weak. We could find no significant effects on real output or the inflation rate. Though the message for the effectiveness of monetary transmission in India is therefore mixed, our results for India are more favorable than is often found for other developing countries.
We analyze the dramatic decline in India’s inflation over the last two years using an augmented Phillips Curve approach and quantify the role of different factors. Our results suggest that, contrary to popular perception, the direct role of lower oil prices in India’s disinflation was relatively modest given the limited pass-through into domestic prices. Instead, we find that inflation is a highly persistent process in India, reflecting very adaptive expectations and the backward looking nature of wage and support price-setting. As a consequence, we find that a moderation of expectations, both backward and forward, and a rationalization of Minimum Support Prices (MSPs), explain the bulk of the disinflation over the last two years.
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