Previous empirical work on political budget cycles (PBCs) implicitly assumes the executive has full discretion over fiscal policy. Instead, we ask what happens when legislative checks and balances limit executive discretion. We find that legislative checks and balances moderate PBCs in countries with high compliance with the law. More effective checks and balances help to explain why cycles are weaker in developed countries and in established democracies. When the discretional component of executive power is isolated, there are significant cycles in all democracies. Copyright 2009 Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

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Political budget cycles (PBCs) result from the credibility problems that office-motivated incumbents face under asymmetric information, due to their temptation to manipulate fiscal policy to increase their electoral chances. We analyze the role of rules that limit debt, crucial for aggregate PBCs to take place. Since the budget process under separation of powers typically requires that the legislature authorize new debt, divided government can make these fiscal rules credible. Commitment is undermined either by unified government or by imperfect compliance with the budget law. When divided government affects efficiency, voters must trade off electoral distortions and government competence.

¿From a theoretical viewpoint, political budget cycles (PBC) arise in equilibrium when rational voters are imperfectly informed about the incumbent's competency and the incumbent enjoys discretionary power over the budget. This paper focuses on the second condition, specifically examining how PBC in the composition of government spending are affected by separation of powers. With an exogenous status quo, the details of the budgetary process, namely, the status quo location, the agenda-setting authority and the degree of compliance with the budgetary law, play critical roles for the existence and the size of PBC. With an endogenous status quo given by the previous period's budget, PBC only arise when there is low compliance with the budgetary law. What drives these results are effective checks and balances, that provide a commitment device to solve the credibility problem behind PBC.JEL Classification: D72, D78.

We develop the implications of devaluation cycles for real exchange rates in a two-sector small open economy with a cash-in-advance constraint. Policy-makers are office-motivated politicians. Voters have incomplete information on the competence and the opportunism of incumbents. Devaluation acts like a tax, and is politically costly because it can signal the government is incompetent. This provides incumbents an incentive to postpone devaluations, and can lead to an overvalued exchange rate before elections. We compare the implied cycle of appreciated/depreciated exchange rates with empirical evidence around elections from Latin America. Copyright Blackwell Publishing Ltd 2005.