The Unassuming Economist

From a new paper by Alberto Alesina, Davide Furceri, Jonathan D. Ostry, Chris Papageorgiou and Dennis P. Quinn:

“We assemble a unique database of reforms in domestic finance, external finance, trade, product markets and labor markets which covers 90 advanced and developing economies from 1973 to 2014. In the 66 democracies which we consider in this paper, we show that these reforms have medium run benefits thus they are electorally more successfully when introduced at the beginning of a new term of office. Liberalizing reforms shortly before elections are costly to incumbents. However, the effect depends on the state of the economy at the time of reform: reforms are sharply penalized during contractions, reforms undertaken in expansions are not punished and sometimes rewarded.”