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Title: Political Cycles and the Macroeconomy by Alberto Alesina, Nouriel Roubini ISBN: 0-262-51094-4 Publisher: MIT Press Pub. Date: 14 November, 1997 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $32.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 3.5 (2 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: Tests competing theories of political business cycles
Comment: Alberto Alesina is one of the leading scholars to adapt that new theory of macroeconomics to the possibility of political goals and motivations on the part of policy makers. And "Political Cycles and the Macroeconomy" is the most comprehensive and authoritative statement of scholarship in this field. It is a theoretical and empirical statement of the state of the art in political macroeconomics. It contains a review of alternative theories and fresh empirical tests. It builds on a decade or more of empirical work by Alesina, with the present colleagues and others, and by many other scholars.
Alesina and his colleagues begin with an intellectual map of opportunistic and partisan theories, for each of which there are traditional models with an exploitable Phillips curve and models that are consistent with rational expectations. The conclusions are that the rational choice and rational expectations theories are more successful than their more traditional predecessors and that the partisan model is more successful than the opportunistic model in explaining macroeconomic behavior. That is, the designated winner on both theoretical and empirical grounds is "rational partisan theory," of which the leading scholar is Alberto Alesina himself. The theories are tested with data for the United States and for most of the developed economies in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD)....
Although the book's empirical work pertains to most OECD nations, there is a separate chapter devoted to political cycles in the United States. Descriptive data regarding inflation, unemployment, and growth are presented, organized by party and position in the electoral cycle. Hypotheses are tested on data for the period from 1947 through 1994. Results support the rational partisan theory and fail to support opportunistic electoral cycle hypotheses. For nonspecialists the most telling evidence in favor of the "rational partisan" theory, as opposed to the traditional theory, is that differences between the parties on unemployment and growth are confined to the first half of administrations, in response to the element of surprise in electoral outcomes, but the differences dissipate in the second half.
"Political Cycles and the Macroeconomy" is a state-of-the-art presentation of an important field bridging economics and political science. Although the technical level of the book is high (some chapters have more than a score of equations), the book is accessible to serious readers and will be rewarding to them. It simultaneously advances the study of macroeconomics and the study of political processes and institutions. It is a fine book.
Rating: 2
Summary: compilation of earlier work but not much else
Comment: The problem here is that almost everything in the book they have already published elsewhere, and thus only is a slight updating of earlier results. It is nice to have them altogether in one source, but the underlying methodology is so questionable as to render it not worthwhile.
The empirical tests to distinguish between various models of political business cycles and partisan theory have been justly criticized. The authors could have made an important contribution by altering their work to properly incorporate the critics, but instead simply restate the problems, pay a little lip service to the issues, and then proceed to ignore them without proper justification.
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Title: Political Economics: Explaining Economic Policy (Zeuthen Lectures) by Torsten Persson, Guido Tabellini ISBN: 0262661314 Publisher: MIT Press Pub. Date: 07 February, 2002 List Price(USD): $35.00 |
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Title: Political Economy in Macroeconomics by Allan Drazen ISBN: 0691092575 Publisher: Princeton Univ Pr Pub. Date: 26 December, 2001 List Price(USD): $37.50 |
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Title: Perspectives on Positive Political Economy by James E. Alt, Kenneth A. Shepsle, Randall Calvert, Thrainn Eggertsson ISBN: 0521398517 Publisher: Cambridge University Press Pub. Date: 28 September, 1990 List Price(USD): $30.00 |
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Title: Globalization and Its Discontents by Joseph E. Stiglitz ISBN: 0393324397 Publisher: W.W. Norton & Company Pub. Date: April, 2003 List Price(USD): $15.95 |
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Title: Global Political Economy : Understanding the International Economic Order by Robert Gilpin ISBN: 069108677X Publisher: Princeton Univ Pr Pub. Date: 20 February, 2001 List Price(USD): $22.95 |
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