IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/oup/restud/v87y2020i6p2568-2599..html
   My bibliography  Save this article

The Political Economy of Debt and Entitlements

Author

Listed:
  • Laurent Bouton
  • Alessandro Lizzeri
  • Nicola Persico

Abstract

This article presents a dynamic political-economic model of total government obligations. Its focus is on the interplay between debt and entitlements. In our model, both are tools by which temporarily powerful groups can extract resources from groups that will be powerful in the future: debt transfers resources across periods; entitlements directly target the future allocation of resources. We prove the following results. First, the presence of endogenous entitlements dampens the incentives of politically powerful groups to accumulate debt, but it leads to an increase in total government obligations. Second, fiscal rules can have perverse effects: if entitlements are unconstrained, and there are capital market frictions, debt limits lead to an increase in total government obligations and to worse outcomes for all groups. Analogous results hold for entitlement limits. Third, our model sheds some lights on the influence of capital market frictions on the incentives of governments to adopt fiscal rules, and implement entitlement programs. Finally, we identify preference polarization as a possible explanation for the joint growth of debt and entitlements.

Suggested Citation

  • Laurent Bouton & Alessandro Lizzeri & Nicola Persico, 2020. "The Political Economy of Debt and Entitlements," The Review of Economic Studies, Review of Economic Studies Ltd, vol. 87(6), pages 2568-2599.
    • Handle: RePEc:oup:restud:v:87:y:2020:i:6:p:2568-2599.
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://hdl.handle.net/10.1093/restud/rdaa003
    Download Restriction: Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Marina Azzimonti & Laura Karpuska & Gabriel Mihalache, 2023. "Bargaining Over Taxes And Entitlements In The Era Of Unequal Growth," International Economic Review, Department of Economics, University of Pennsylvania and Osaka University Institute of Social and Economic Research Association, vol. 64(3), pages 893-941, August.
    2. Grechyna, Daryna, 2021. "Mandatory spending, political polarization, and macroeconomic volatility," European Journal of Political Economy, Elsevier, vol. 68(C).
    3. Gianmarco Daniele & Amedeo Piolatto & Willem Sas, 2018. "Who Sent You? Strategic Voting, Transfers and Bailouts in a Federation," Working Papers. Serie AD 2018-05, Instituto Valenciano de Investigaciones Económicas, S.A. (Ivie).
    4. Esslinger, Christoph & Boyer, Pierre, 2015. "Public debt and the political economy of reforms," VfS Annual Conference 2015 (Muenster): Economic Development - Theory and Policy 113107, Verein für Socialpolitik / German Economic Association.
    5. Maximilian Kellner, 2023. "Strategic effects of stock pollution: the positive theory of fiscal deficits revisited," Public Choice, Springer, vol. 194(1), pages 157-179, January.
    6. Gianmarco Daniele & Amedeo Piolatto & Willem Sas, 2020. "Does the Winner Take It All? Redistributive Policies and Political Extremism," Working Papers 1157, Barcelona School of Economics.
    7. Uchida, Yuki & Ono, Tetsuo, 2021. "Borrowing to finance public investment: a politico-economic analysis of fiscal rules," MPRA Paper 115844, University Library of Munich, Germany, revised 31 Dec 2022.
    8. Chistoph Grosse-Steffen & Laura Pagenhardt & Malte Rieth, 2021. "Committed to Flexible Fiscal Rules," Working papers 854, Banque de France.
    9. Jocelyne Zoumenou, 2023. "On the impact of fiscal policy on inflation: The case of fiscal rules," EconomiX Working Papers 2023-21, University of Paris Nanterre, EconomiX.
    10. Marina Azzimonti & Gabriel P. Mihalache & Laura Karpuska, 2020. "Bargaining over Taxes and Entitlements," NBER Working Papers 27595, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    11. Niklas Potrafke, 2023. "The Economic Consequences of Fiscal Rules," CESifo Working Paper Series 10765, CESifo.

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:oup:restud:v:87:y:2020:i:6:p:2568-2599.. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Oxford University Press (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://academic.oup.com/restud .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.