the mit press political economics explaining economic policy 2000

[...]... relevance The Zeuthen Lectures are organized by the Institute of Economics, University of Copenhagen The lecture series is named after Frederik Zeuthen, a former professor at the Institute of Economics Karl Gunnar Persson Foreword Political economics has become one of the most active research areas in the last decades Building on earlier work of the public choice school, rational expectations macroeconomics,... improving the quality of the final product The material underlying the book was used in various courses and lectures that we gave separately or together in the recent past: the Seventh Summer School in Economic Theory at the Hebrew University, Harvard University, the Kiel Institute for World Economic Studies, the London School of Economics, the NAKE Lectures in the Netherlands and, naturally, at our home... again in the 1990s, though earlier in some countries than in others How can we explain the variations in the data? And what are the sources of the common patterns? Do these outcomes covary systematically with other aspects of economic policy or with the economic and social environment? Can alternative political constitutions and legislative procedures explain part of the policy outcomes? Are the observed... traditions in economics and political science The most recent tradition, from which we come as economists, is the theory of macroeconomic policy, dating back to the work by Lucas in the mid-1970s Lucas taught us to study the consequences of economic policy by contrasting systematic policy rules Only when policy is formulated as a rule can we give precise content to private expectations, through the assumption... in economics or political science, but some of the material could also be used in advanced undergraduate courses Although the book is self-contained and most concepts and methods are developed gradually, the reader should have a good background in microeconomics, macroeconomics, and applied game theory Part 1 of the book introduces the analytical tools and is a prerequisite for the remainder of the. .. provision, the burden of taxation across alternative tax bases, the size of government deficits, the extent of corruption by public officials, the structure of labor market regulation, the stance of monetary policy during the course of the business cycle or the electoral cycle? When searching for an answer to these questions, we reach the boundary between political science and economics As in political. .. Foreword The Zeuthen Lectures offer a forum for leading scholars to develop and synthesize novel results in theoretical and applied economics They aim to present advances in knowledge in a form accessible to a wide audience of economists and advanced students of economics The choice of topics will range from abstract theorizing to economic history Regardless of the topic, the emphasis in the lecture... macroeconomic theory of policy and exploit the tools of rational choice in analyzing some of the classic problems in public choice Positive versus Normative Analysis The book always conceives economic policy as the equilibrium outcome of a well-defined noncooperative game under primitive assumptions about economic and political behavior The rules of that game reflect the nature of the political institutions... policies to maximize their chances of winning elections, perhaps also taking into account their desire to extract rents or to implement policies consistent with their partisan view of the world Citizens evaluate the policy platforms on the table and cast their votes for the candidate they deem best The essential political action thus takes place in the electoral campaign, and the role of the election is... choice and political institutions We want to understand how policy decisions are made, what shapes the incentives and constraints of the policymakers taking those decisions, and how conflicts over policy are resolved But as in economics, we are ultimately interested in the outcomes of policy decisions We also want to understand how the economic consequences of policy feed back into private agents’ policy . expectations macroeconomics, and game theory, political economics has taken the next step by including rational voters, parties, and politicians in the models. In political economics, rational. Summer School in Economic Theory at the Hebrew University, Harvard University, the Kiel Institute for World Economic Studies, the London School of Economics, the NAKE Lectures in the Netherlands and,. 14:17 Political Economics Explaining Economic Policy Torsten Persson and Guido Tabellini The MIT Press Cambridge, Massachusetts London, England III Persson Persson-FM May 22, 2000 14:17 c  2000 Massachusetts