Mitigating Political Budget Cycles

Recent literature suggests that electoral budget cycles are a phenomenon of new rather than established democracies. Cameron A. Shelton has discovered that the development of a strong party system helps mitigate these cycles. Especially in majoritarian electoral systems, institutionalised party systems are associated with mitigated political budget cycles. His study on this phenomenon will soon appear in print as "Legislative Electoral Budget Cycles" in Public Choice.

Mr Shelton's research focuses on political economy and macroeconomics. His graduate-level teaching includes courses on "Growth and Development: Theory and Implications", the "Political Economy of Governance" and "Applied Game Theory for Political Economy". His wide-ranging publications have examined the size and composition of government expenditure, the aging population and the size of the welfare state, the Venezuelan fiscal policy response to the oil boom, political prediction markets in Taiwan and fundraising in US presidential primaries.

Cameron A. Shelton is Assistant Professor at the Robert Day School of Economics and Finance of Claremont McKenna College, Claremont, California. He was previously Assistant Professor in the Department of Economics of Wesleyan University. An undergraduate of Stanford University, he received his PhD from Stanford for a thesis entitled: "Essays in the Political Economy of Monetary and Fiscal Policy". He was awarded the Wicksell Prize in 2007 for the best paper by a young author presented at the First World Meeting of the Public Choice Societies.