urban spatial structure urban structure is increasingly characterized by decentralization dispersion and multiple employment centers much is known empirically about such patterns and about how the interplay between agglomerative and dispersive forces generates spatial structures that are complex and prone to multiple equilibria and dynamic path dependence these forces operate at different spatial scales many entail unpriced interaction and external scale economies deriving from product differentiation and endogenous technical change appear particularly important because these forces interact in complex ways inefficiencies in urban structure are resistant to simple policy interventions

the impact of campaign expenditures on political competition in the french legislative elections of 1993 we use regression analysis to estimate the effect that campaign money had on the votes of challengers and incumbents in the 1993 elections to the french legislative assembly incumbent candidates can at best expect to win 1 01 of the popular vote for each extra franc they spend per registered voter in their district challengers can expect to win at least twice as much as this simulations show that if campaign spending ceilings were halved incumbents would have gained an extra ten percent of the popular vote over their closest challenging rivals the regression analysis also suggests that voters react negatively to candidates who rely heavily on their own money for their outlays and reward candidates who rely on contributions from private individuals these results suggest that campaign spending ceilings may inhibit political competition and that voters may resist a candidate who relies on narrow sources of funding

on the causal links between fdi and growth in developing countries we analyse the granger causal relationships between foreign direct investment fdi and gdp in a sample of 31 developing countries covering 31 years using estimators for heterogeneous panel data we find bi directional causality between the fdi to gdp ratio and the level of gdp fdi has a lasting impact on gdp while gdp has no longrun impact on the fdi to gdp ratio in that sense fdi causes growth furthermore in a model for gdp and fdi as a fraction of gross capital formation gcf we also find long run effects from fdi to gdp this finding may be interpreted as evidence in favour of the hypotheses that fdi has an impact on gdp via knowledge transfers and adoption of new technology

the quantitative importance of news shocks in estimated dsge models we estimate a dynamic stochastic general equilibrium dsge model with several frictions and both unanticipated and news shocks using quarterly u s data from 1954 to 2004 and bayesian methods we find that unanticipated shocks dominate news shocks in accounting for the unconditional variance of output consumption and investment growth interest rate and the relative price of investment the unanticipated shock to the marginal efficiency of investment is the dominant shock accounting for over 45 of the variance in output growth news shocks account for less than 15 of the variance in output growth within the set of news shocks nontechnology sources of news dominate technology news with wage markup news shocks accounting for about 60 of the variance share of both hours and inflation we find that in the estimated dsge model i the presence of endogenous countercyclical price and wage markups due to nominal frictions substantially diminishes the importance of news shocks relative to a model without these frictions and ii while there is little change in the estimated contributions of technology news when we restrict wealth effects on labor supply the contributions of nontechnology news shocks are relatively more sensitive

general economic conditions and national elections the fact that economic conditions influence voters is a leading commonplace of conversation in election years the question is is this fact in fact a fact despite the overwhelming popularity of the fact it has received neither an explicit theoretical analysis presumably because it is so obvious that economic adversity should create political adversaries nor until recently a satisfactory statistical analysis gerald h kramer has presented a multivariate analysis of congressional elections which would strongly suggest that fluctuations in the rate of unemployment have no appreciable effect upon elections but that fluctuations in per capita real income are influential in the following pages i propose to 1 reaffirm his finding on the electoral unimportance of ordinary fluctuations in unemployment 2 argue that contrary to kramer fluctuations in real income also do not have important electoral effects and 3 present an argument based upon rational voter behavior for the unimportance of general economic conditions in national elections

business cycle and political election outcomes evidence from the chilean democracy this paper explores the influence of economic variables in chilean presidential elections we use a panel where the dependent variable corresponds to the share of the vote obtained by the incumbent at a municipal level in the presidential elections of 1989 1993 and 1999 we focus on the unemployment rate and the output gap and find that both have a significant influence on the vote we also find that if the mayor is from the same coalition as the incumbent people will further punish the incumbent when regional unemployment is above national unemployment

can the president really affect economic growth presidential effort and the political business cycle presidential elections are often seen as referendums on the health of the economy however little evidence exists on the president s ability to influence gross domestic product gdp this study examines the effect of the incentive to be reelected and the resulting increase in presidential effort on gdp growth growth is found to rise in reelection years for first term presidents after 1932 and to fall in election years before 1932 when reelection was uncommon and for second term presidents generally this effect is largest for high quality presidents who probably have the highest return to effort and is spread across multiple sectors of the economy jel d78 d72 e32 j24

flexible pensions for politicians it may be difficult to motivate politicians in their last term to solve this problem we suggest a triple mechanism involving political information markets flexible pensions and democratic elections an information market is used to predict the potential reelection chances of the politician pensions depend on the price in the information market and thereby motivate the politician to act in a socially optimal manner we show that on balance the triple mechanism increases social welfare finally we suggest several ways to avoid the manipulation of information markets and we discuss possible pitfalls of flexible pensions

bread and peace voting in u s presidential elections a simple bread and peace model shows that aggregate votes forpresident in postwar elections were determined entirely byweighted average growth of real disposable personal income percapita during the incumbent party s term and the cumulativenumbers of american military personnel killed in action as aresult of u s intervention in the korean and vietnamese civilwars the model is subjected to robustness tests against twenty two variations in functional form inspired by the extensiveliterature on presidential voting not one of these variationsadds value to the bread and peace model or significantly perturbsits coefficients

voter turnout in us presidential elections does carville s law explain the time series we estimate a time series model of voter turnout for 34 us presidential elections 1880 2012 employing a variety of econometric techniques our major results are as follows 1 a negative and significant structural shift in voter turnout occurs in 1972 and is too large to be explained by the lowering of the voting age 2 the 1972 shift is the only statistically significant structural shift to occur since the first decade of the twentieth century 3 short term macroeconomic conditions significantly impact turnout with unemployment having a positive effect 4 turnout in recent presidential elections has not deviated significantly from the post 1972 norm 5 turnout is positively related to the expected closeness of the election outcome but contrary to some theoretical predictions closeness exhibits no trend over time

term premia and inflation uncertainty empirical evidence from an international panel dataset this paper provides cross country empirical evidence on bond risk premia i construct a panel of zero coupon nominal government bond yields spanning ten industrialized countries and nearly two decades i hence compute forward rates and then use two different methods to decompose these forward rates into expected future short term interest rates and term premiums the first method uses an affine term structure model with macroeconomic variables as unspanned risk factors the second method uses surveys i find that term premium estimates declined across countries over the sample period especially in countries that appear to have reduced inflation uncertainty by making substantial changes in the monetary policy frameworks of their central banks during the recent financial crisis term premiums have remained flat and even declined further in some countries perhaps reflecting the effects of quantitative easing actions by many central banks

broadband penetration and economic growth nexus evidence from cross country panel data this article investigates whether there are granger causal relationships between broadband penetration degree of urbanization foreign direct investment and economic growth using a panel data set covering the g 20 countries for the period 1998 2011 using our multivariate framework we first find that all of the variables are cointegrated our findings further reveal a network of causal connections between the variables including short run bidirectional causality between broadband penetration and economic growth among the more developed countries within the g 20 on the other hand for the developing countries within the g 20 there is evidence of unidirectional causality from economic growth to broadband penetration

bread and the attrition of power economic events and german election results aggregate votes for incumbent parties in post war germany were determined by the weighted average growth of real per capita disposable income each percentage point of per capita real disposable income growth sustained over the legislative term yielded approximately two percentage points of votes in germany no other economic variables add value or significantly perturb the coefficients of our model however attrition of power reduced the vote share in election years 1961 1994 and 1998

a theory of political cycles abstract we study how the proximity of elections affects policy choices in a model in which policymakers want to improve their reputation to increase their reelection chances policymakers equilibrium decisions depend on both their reputation and the proximity of the next election typically incentives to influence election results are stronger closer to the election for a given reputation level as argued in the political cycles literature and these political cycles are less important when the policymaker s reputation is better our analysis sheds light on other agency relationships in which part of the compensation is decided upon infrequently

how lasting is voter gratitude an analysis of the short and long term electoral returns to beneficial policy dominant theories of electoral behavior emphasize that voters myopically evaluate policy performance and that this shortsightednessmayobstructthewelfare improvingeffectofdemocraticaccountability however weknowlittleabouthow long governments receive electoral credit for beneficial policies we exploit the massive policy response to a major natural disaster the 2002 elbe flooding in germany to provide an upper bound for the short and long term electoral returns to targeted policy benefits we estimate that the flood response increased vote shares for the incumbent party by 7 percentage points in affected areas in the 2002 election twenty five percent of this short term reward carried over to the 2005 election before the gains vanished in the 2009 election we conclude that given favorable circumstances policy makers can generate voter gratitude that persists longer than scholarship has acknowledged so far and elaborate on the implications for theories of electoral behavior democratic accountability and public policy

voting and economic factors in french elections for the european parliament this article builds and estimates several econometric models that explain and forecast the outcomes of the french elections for the european parliament these models show the influence of the change in the local unemployment rate to explain the vote for the moderate left and the moderate right in the french elections for the european parliament these models appear to be accurate in forecasting the elections of the past and their behavior for the 2009 french election for the european parliament is satisfactory

economic growth as a function of human capital internet and work the world bank has suggested the need to enhance information and communication technology skills in all sectors because a 10 increase in internet connectivity was found to boost gdp growth by 1 38 simultaneously the oecd argued that high internet access rates generate a 2 increase in gdp because the internet positively affects economic growth we investigated the relationship between an economically active population human capital and technology to evaluate these effects in mexico a data series from 1991 to 2010 was analysed in three stages according to the least squares method a cobb douglas function under the solow model was considered technology and internet access were found to positively affect top level students and graduate students and thus contribute to the global innovation index

does the fed contribute to a political business cycle in contrast to findings of other studies evidence is presented to support the existence of a federal reserve induced political monetary cycle that corresponds to the u s presidential election cycle using various taylor rules we find support for the view that fed policy turns significantly more expansionary in the seven quarters prior to the election but only when the fed chair and incumbent presidential party have partisan affiliations

econometrics and presidential elections this paper discusses an econometric equation that explains votes for president as a function of economic events and incumbency information the history of the equation is reviewed the update after the 1992 election is discussed and a prediction for the 1996 election is made conditional on an economic forecast

political support for reforms economics of voting in transition countries i analyze the relationship between economics and politics across eight parliamentary elections in four transition countries the czech republic hungary poland and slovakia i argue that support for reform reflects the balance between positive and negative effects of the reform accordingly i identify economic groups that support or oppose the reform the former are private entrepreneurs white collar workers and university educated voters the latter are the unemployed retirees and blue collar and agricultural workers this general pattern holds both within countries and across countries and across tenures of different governments in contrast with the responsibility hypothesis voters in the transition countries are found to be forward looking not retrospective

is there a dead spot new evidence on fomc decisions before elections using new data that chronicle the fed s internal forecast of the output gap from 1973 to 1998 this paper tests for an electoral cycle in the decisions of the federal open market committee fomc the paper provides evidence of a dead spot in the committee s decisions before presidential elections for given values of these internal forecasts the fomc is less likely to decide to tighten monetary policy in the year preceding a presidential election than at other times

trivariate causality between economic growth urbanisation and electricity consumption in angola cointegration and causality analysis abstract this paper investigates the causal relationship between economic growth urbanisation and electricity consumption in the case of angola while utilizing the data over the period of 1971 2009 we have applied lee and strazicich 2003 the review of economics and statistics 63 1082 1089 2004 working paper department of economics appalachian state university unit root tests to examine the stationarity properties of the series using the gregory hansen structural break cointegration procedure as a complement we employ the ardl bounds test to investigate long run relationships the vecm granger causality test is subsequently used to examine the direction of causality between economic growth urbanisation and electricity consumption our results indicate the existence of long run relationships we further observe evidence in favour of bidirectional causality between electricity consumption and economic growth the feedback hypothesis is also found between urbanisation and economic growth urbanisation and electricity consumption granger cause each other we conclude that angola is energy dependent country consequently the relevant authorities should boost electricity production as one of the means of achieving sustainable economic development in the long run

term structure evidence on interest rate smoothing and monetary policy inertia abstract numerous studies have used quarterly data to estimate monetary policy rules or reaction functions that appear to exhibit a very slow partial adjustment of the policy interest rate the conventional wisdom asserts that this gradual adjustment reflects a policy inertia or interest rate smoothing behavior by central banks however such quarterly monetary policy inertia would imply a large amount of forecastable variation in interest rates at horizons of more than 3 months which is contradicted by evidence from the term structure of interest rates the illusion of monetary policy inertia evident in the estimated policy rules likely reflects the persistent shocks that central banks face

determinants of county level voting patterns in the 2012 and 2016 presidential elections county level data are used to estimate the incumbent party share of the two party vote in the 2012 and the 2016 u s presidential elections using a seemingly unrelated estimation procedure the r

financial depth internet penetration rates and economic growth country panel evidence abstractthe article investigates causal relationships between internet penetration rates financial depth and per capita economic growth in the next 11 countries using panel vector autoregressive var approaches our empirical results show that these variables are cointegrated moreover we find bidirectional causality between internet penetration rates and economic growth and between financial depth and economic growth in the short run

a theory of demand shocks this paper presents a model of business cycles driven by shocks to consumer expectations regarding aggregate productivity agents are hit by heterogeneous productivity shocks they observe their own productivity and a noisy public signal regarding aggregate productivity the public signal gives rise to noise shocks which have the features of aggregate demand shocks they increase output employment and inflation in the short run and have no effects in the long run numerical examples suggest that the model can generate sizable equilibrium dsge models of the business cycle include a large number of shocks to technol ogy monetary policy preferences etc but typically do not include expectational shocks as independent drivers of short run fluctuations 1 this paper explores the idea of expectation driven cycles looking at a model where technology determines equilibrium output in the long run and consumers receive noisy signals about technology in the short run the presence of noisy signals produces expectational errors this paper studies the role of these expectational errors in gener ating volatility at business cycle frequencies the model is based on two ingredients first consumers take time to recognize permanent changes in aggregate fundamentals although they may have good information on the current state of the individual firm or sector where they operate they have only limited information regarding the long run determinants of aggregate activity second consumers have access to public information that is relevant to estimate long run productivity this includes news about technological innovations publicly released macroeconomic and sectoral statistics financial market prices and public statements by policy makers however these signals provide only a noisy forecast of the long run effects of technological innovations this opens the door to noise shocks which induce consumers to temporarily overestimate or underestimate the productive capacity of the economy

changes in the federal reserve communication strategy a structural investigation this paper structurally investigates the changes in the fed s communication strategy since the mid 1990s through the lens of anticipated and unanticipated disturbances to a taylor rule the anticipated disturbances are identified using treasury bond yield data in estimating a dynamic stochastic general equilibrium dsge model with a term structure of interest rates our estimation results show that the fed s decisions were unanticipated for market participants until 1999 but thereafter a larger portion of its future policy actions tended to be communicated in advance we also find that the relative contribution of the anticipated monetary policy disturbances to macroeconomic fluctuations became larger after 1999 the bond yield data is indispensable to these results since it contains crucial information on an expected future path of the federal funds rate

it s the economy and then some modeling the presidential vote with state panel data using data for the 50 us states for presidential elections from 1972 to 2004 two theories for determining state voting outcomes are considered jointly the economy matters and home grown ness theories fixed effects regressions show that measures of the economy matters real income unemployment and a proxy for inflation have the predicted effects on state voting patterns for presidential elections the home grown theory receives mixed support there is weak evidence that incumbent party candidates garner greater support in their home states there is strong support however for the proposition that incumbent party candidates fare worse in the home state of rival party candidates

is the political business cycle for real abstract this paper constructs and examines a macroeconomic model which combines features from both real and political business cycle models we augment a standard real business cycle tax model by allowing for varying levels of government partisanship and competence in order to replicate two important empirical regularities first that on average the economy expands early under democratic presidents and contracts early under republican presidents second that presidents whose parties successfully retain the presidency have stronger than average growth in the second half of their terms the model generates both of these features that conform to u s post world war ii data

party cues in elections under multilevel governance theory and evidence from us states this is the authors accepted refereed and final manuscript to the article the final publication is available at www elsevier com

urban concentration agglomeration economies and the level of economic development there is a view among planners in the developing nations that the process of economic development invariably results in the concentration of population in one or two primal cities there is also however considerable disagreement over whether this apparent relationship is either necessary or desirable proponents on the one hand argue that concentrated urbanization strongly supports industrial development through the realization of scale and agglomeration economies 2 dissenters from this view feel that urban concentration creates serious social costs and results more from historical or political forces than economic ones in this case policies aimed at decentralizing growth can achieve social objectives without sacrificing economic efficiency despite these deliberations it is surprising that there has been little or no empirical study of urban concentration on either a longitudinal or cross national basis the major related work which exists is williamson s research on economic development and income inequality 3 williamson demonstrates that as economic growth begins inequality initially increases but then diminishes in the more advanced stages of development this coincides with hirschman s4 view that industrialization eventually spreads into more backward areas reduc

government subsidies and presidential election outcomes evidence for a developing country summary we explore the effects of government subsidies on presidential elections in chile in 1989 99 we use a panel with three periods the elections of 1989 1993 and 1999 and 229 counties we correct for the potential simultaneity problem deriving from the fact that an incumbent facing a difficult political scenario might react by increasing subsidies to improve his her electoral performance our results indicate that the greater the coverage of these types of programs i e the percentage of people receiving subsidies the higher the votes for the incumbent

politics at the water s edge parties voters and the use of force abroad this article examines the effects of party politics and presidential election cycles on u s recourse to force abroad i analyze a game theoretic model to generate predictions about these effects in the unique time consistent equilibrium outcome of the one shot game policy varies across political parties in a subgame perfect equilibrium outcome of the repeated game the use of force is invariant to the partisan composition of government in neither case does policy respond to the electoral cycle an empirical analysis supports the predictions of the repeated game between 1870 and 1992 u s recourse to force abroad responds neither to partisan politics nor to the domestic political calendar it responds only to changes in u s power status and to the advent of general wars

information and efficiency in political stock markets using computerized markets to predict election results this study concentrates on four computerized political markets in germany between 1990 and 1998 while this new method for the prediction of election events worked quite well in the usa it did not perform as well in germany searching for the causes of this distinction it is shown that in contrast to the findings of forsythe et al 1992 i extraordinary profits were achieved less by people who took advantage of other people s anomalies than by those people who acquired an advantage from the existence of asymmetric information ii the marginal trader hypothesis does not hold when applied to german markets and that iii traders relied on public opinion polls it is argued that these distinctions are caused by the differences in the german and the us voting systems additionally it is shown that to a certain extent iv election markets were able to predict the contemporary mood of the electorate without the help of public opinion polls v first of all the informed traders used public opinion pol