Alexander Slaski’s research while affiliated with Georgetown University and other places

Many scholars and policymakers see rising debt burdens in the industrialised world as the product of ageing populations. Prominent theoretical models of government debt accumulation – used to justify fiscal rules and austerity measures – explicitly assume that support for debt reduction decreases with age. While such models have been influential, the fundamental relationship between age and preferences for debt has not been tested empirically. We test this argument but further theorise that the relationship between age and debt preferences is non‐linear. While the elderly have a clear preference for ignoring debt burdens, we add that the young should also prefer to delay reckoning with high national debts given their low income and expectations of higher future earnings. Using survey data (N=112,689), we find that age does have a small to modest non‐linear impact on concern for national deficits and debt burdens. Middle‐aged respondents are most concerned about debt reduction, while the young and old view reducing government debt as less of a policy priority. Notably, the relationship is strongest in countries with more generous old‐age benefits. This article is protected by copyright. All rights reserved

Popular media and politicians have often blamed the high public debt of some EU countries on cultural differences. These claims are most apparent in the discourse contrasting ostensibly prudent Northern Europeans with spendthrift Southern Europeans. Despite the prominence of these and similar narratives and evidence that culture plays a nontrivial role in other economic outcomes, there is no systematic evidence that culture influences attitudes towards sovereign debt in the EU. We provide the first empirical test of this claim using over 233,000 responses to a Eurobarometer question about the salience of national debt. Our analysis reveals that national and sub-national differences explain very little of the variance in debt preferences. Further, the differences that do emerge do not fit existing cultural narratives. Additional analysis reveals that established measures of national culture or religious observance, at the national and regional levels, do not correlate with debt attitudes as cultural arguments would predict.

Governments frequently offer tax incentives to induce localized investments. This is puzzling because previous research finds tax incentives are rarely decisive factors in firms’ locational decision-making. Some argue incentives reflect hyper capital mobility, which strengthens multinational enterprises’ bargaining leverage vis-à-vis governments that wish to attract investment. Others emphasize the domestic political institutions and electoral considerations that incentivize politicians to publicly court investors. We argue that firms’ leverage over governments stems from investment characteristics associated with governments’ broader development objectives. We test our argument on deal-level data on investment incentives in Latin America from 2010 to 2017. Our results indicate firms are more likely to receive incentives when they are already embedded in local markets and when they exhibit characteristics associated with low ex post mobility. These results challenge widely held beliefs over what provides firms political power in an age of globalization, and suggest that governments use incentives primarily to fulfill their economic and political objectives rather than because globalization destroys states’ capacity to tax mobile capital.

This paper examines the effects of foreign electoral shocks on currency markets. I develop a theory of signaling and uncertainty to explain why elections in countries with close economic ties should affect exchange rates. Methodologically, this paper focuses on several case studies, with the 2016 US election as a central case. I utilize an event analysis framework to measure the impact of the election on the Mexican peso by exploiting the plausible exogeneity of Donald Trump's tweets. I also measure changes in the peso using Trump's predicted chance of winning the election and show that the peso is weakest when Trump has the highest chance of winning the election. In addition, I include a series of robustness checks and analyses of other notable recent cases when electoral uncertainty affected currencies in other countries, including the 2018 Brazilian election. The results quantify the effect of foreign elections on exchange rates, building on the existing literature that focuses on how domestic elections shape currency markets. I conclude with a discussion of the external validity of the phenomenon demonstrated by the cases in the paper, charting future research on the topic and outlining ways to extend the findings.

Many scholars and policymakers see the continuing rise of debt burdens in the advanced industrialized world as the product of aging populations and increasing dependency ratios. In fact, many prominent theoretical models of government debt accumulation -- often used to justify fiscal rules and austerity measures -- make explicit assumptions that individuals will have different preferences for debt reduction as they age. While such models have been influential, the fundamental assumption regarding the relationship between age and preferences for growing debt has not been test empirically. Using a decade's worth of data from the Eurobarometer survey across 33 countries, we find that age has a modest, non-linear impact on concern for national debt burdens. In general, the middle-aged show the most concern for debt reduction, while the young and the old are less likely to view reducing government debt as a policy priority. Notably, the relationship is strongest in countries with more generous old-age benefits.

Why do governments compete for investment through tax incentives when there is strong evidence that such packages are inconsequential to the locational decisions of foreign firms? Previous scholarship has attributed pro-business policies such as investment incentives to factors including the structural power of business in an era of international capital mobility, fiscal competition generated through political decentralization or electoral pandering by political leaders. However, there is currently little understanding about how individuals, in their role as decision-makers within government agencies, form beliefs over how to best attract investment. Building on insights from the bureaucratic politics and behavioral economics literatures, we anticipate investment promotion professionals are more likely to view investment incentives as effective attraction tools when they have limited previous experience in the private sector, when they work for investment promotion agencies that are more integrated into the national bureaucracy, and when employee performance is evaluated based on deals closed. We test these expectations with a conjoint survey experiment of investment promotion professionals designed to uncover respondents’ beliefs over the relative importance of different components of the investment environment to firms’ locational decisions, and find substantial support for our expectations.