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Political disagreement, lack of commitment and the level of debt

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Davide Debortoli
Ricardo Nunes

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Abstract

We analyze how public debt evolves when successive policymakers have different policy goals and cannot make credible commitments about their future policies. We consider several cases to be able to disentangle and quantify the respective effects of imperfect commitment and political disagreement. Absent political turnover, imperfect commitment drives the long-run level of debt to zero. With political disagreement, debt is a sizeable fraction of GDP and increasing in the degree of polarization among parties, no matter the degree of commitment. The frequency of political turnover does not produce quantitatively relevant effects. These results are consistent with much of the existing empirical evidence. Finally, we find that in the presence of political disagreement the welfare gains of building commitment are lower.

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Paper provided by Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System (U.S.) in its series International Finance Discussion Papers with number 938.

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Date of creation: 2008
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Keywords: Debts; Public ; Fiscal policy;

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  1. Davide Debortoli & Ricardo Nunes, 2007. "Loose commitment," International Finance Discussion Papers 916, Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System (U.S.). [Downloadable!]
  2. Davide Debortoli & Ricardo Nunes, 2008. "The macroeconomic effect of external pressures on monetary policy," International Finance Discussion Papers 944, Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System (U.S.). [Downloadable!]
  3. Campbell Leith & Simon Wren-Lewis, 2008. "Electoral uncertainty and the deficit bias in a New Keynesian Economy," Working Papers 2009_11, Department of Economics, University of Glasgow, revised Feb 2009. [Downloadable!]
    Other versions:
  4. Nunes, Ricardo, 2008. "Delegation and Loose Commitment," MPRA Paper 11555, University Library of Munich, Germany. [Downloadable!]
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