Membership in a monetary union reduces the possibilities to counteract fluctuations in productivity by monetary policy. One condition for entrance not to lead to adverse unemployment performance is that wages are flexible with respect to... more
Membership in a monetary union reduces the possibilities to counteract fluctuations in productivity by monetary policy. One condition for entrance not to lead to adverse unemployment performance is that wages are flexible with respect to productivity. Here I ...
The purpose of this paper is to trace partisan differencesamong Swedish governments during the period 1958-2000. According tothe Partisan Theory of macroeconomic policy left-wing governmentsare relatively more concerned with the... more
The purpose of this paper is to trace partisan differencesamong Swedish governments during the period 1958-2000. According tothe Partisan Theory of macroeconomic policy left-wing governmentsare relatively more concerned with the performance of the realside of the economy (real output and unemployment) as compared toright-wing governments, that place a higher weight on the nominalvariables (inflation). Left-wing governments would therefore pursue moreexpansionary aggregate demand policy, and thereby be willingto risk a higher inflation, in order to improve real economicperformance. In this paper we apply the model developed in Hibbs (1994) onSwedish data. Our empirical results support the partisan theory,showing that, ceteris paribus, aggregate demand policy under left-winggovernments is relatively more expansionary than under right-wing governments, even if the expansionary policysometimes leads to higher inflation.
