strength in numbers group size and political mobilization abstract an important result in interest group theory and political economy is that small groups are more influential than their size would lead us to expect in this study we document that the opposite holds for political mobilization citizens are more likely to participate in elections if they belong to large groups we present evidence that both the absolute size of groups and their population share influence individual participation decisions the link between group size and political mobilization is in part due to the structure of media markets candidates find it easier to direct campaign messages at larger groups because many existing media outlets cater to them

energy vulnerability around the world the global energy vulnerability index gevi abstract vulnerability has garnered an increasing attention from academia international community and industry nonetheless formal definition mainstreaming and measurement of vulnerability are still flawed in the economic literature energy vulnerability intended as the exposure of an energy system to adverse events and change often overlaps with other energy policy concepts such as resilience security poverty justice and sustainability this paper improves understanding of vulnerability in economics energy and sustainability studies by i constructing a dataset on energy vulnerability made of 180 000 observations ii formally defining energy vulnerability while considering the regulatory framework and development agenda iii building a composite indicator on energy vulnerability iv analyzing and ranking the energy vulnerability of a vast number of oecd and non oecd countries v testing for robustness checks the analysis suggests that gdp is not necessarily a leading driver for energy vulnerability whilst resource embedment is since fossil and renewable energy producers are less vulnerable eventually the paper validates that green countries are less vulnerable differently from cold heavily industrialized and highly consuming countries

media markets and localism does local news en espanol boost hispanic voter turnout the same time the availability of these products reduces the consumption of local news not only because some consumers prefer national and global content to local information but also because local media products that lose a significant number of consumers are forced to cut qual ity and they may even cease to exist if their audience falls below a critical threshold for these reasons some scholars claim that the rise of integrated media markets undermines local civic engagement robert d putnam 2000 against this backdrop many regulatory agencies including the federal communications commission fcc of the united states seek to protect local media and promote localism for instance by limiting ownership concentration 1 however localism is desirable only if there are in fact positive spillovers from the provision of local content that can help justify the loss of private welfare that integrated media markets would provide in this paper we propose a simple test for the existence of spillovers from local news pro gramming asking if the presence of local television news affects civic behavior the ubiq uity of local news programming across all us metro areas makes it impossible to study its effects on the general population in contrast the availability of spanish language news has increased considerably in recent years providing us with an experiment to study the effect of local news on one important measure of civic engagement voter turnout in local elections in particular we use a differencing approach asking whether hispanic voter turnout is higher in relation to non hispanic turnout in metro areas with spanish language local television news our results indicate that spanish language local television news raises hispanic turnout by more than 4 percentage points local news targeted at hispanics has no effect on the participa tion of non hispanics and as one would expect a significantly smaller effect in years with a presidential race in markets with spanish language news about a quarter of hispanics turn to these programs our estimates thus imply that news in spanish caused about a fifth of spanish language news viewers to start voting interestingly hispanics with access to news in spanish do not increase the time they spend watching news content analyses of spanish language news programs in the united states find that these shows are much more likely to report on

real exchange rates and real interest rate differentials a present value interpretation although the real exchange rate real interest rate reri relationship is central to most open economy macroeconomic models empirical support for the relationship is generally found to be rather weak in this paper we re investigate the reri relationship using bilateral us real exchange rate data spanning the period 1978 2007 instead of testing one particular model we build on campbell and shiller 1987 cointegration tests of present value models journal of political economy 95 1062 1088 to propose a metric of the economic significance of the relationship our empirical results provide robust evidence that the reri link is economically significant and that the real interest rate differential is a reasonable approximation of the expected rate of depreciation over longer horizons

media competition and electoral politics we build a framework linking competition in the media market to political participation media outlets report on the ability of candidates running for office and compete for audience through their choice of slant citizens consume news only if the expected utility of being informed about candidates ability is sufficiently large for their group collectively our results can reconcile seemingly contradictory empirical evidence showing that entry in the media market can either increase or decrease turnout while information pushes up independent turnout partisans adjust their turnout to the ability of their preferred candidate and on average they vote less when informed

liquidity and exchange rates abstract we present a two country extension of lucas s 1988a work on cash in advance constraints in asset markets in the model there is temporary separation between the goods and asset markets and money is used for transactions in both we first find that the exchange rate level depends on the share of money used for asset transactions a greater share appreciates the currency second stochastic open market operations increasing the domestic bonds supply appreciate the domestic currency third the liquidity effects of bond supply shocks cause an excess volatility of nominal exchange rates even when their fundamental value is constant

political advertising and election results we study the persuasive effects of political advertising our empirical strategy exploits fcc regulations that result in plausibly exogenous variation in the number of impressions across the borders of neighboring counties applying this approach to detailed data on television advertisement broadcasts and viewership patterns during the 2004 12 presidential campaigns our results indicate that total political advertising has almost no impact on aggregate turnout by contrast we find a positive and economically meaningful effect of advertising on candidates vote shares taken at face value our estimates imply that a one standard deviation increase in the partisan difference in advertising raises the partisan difference in vote shares by about 0 5 percentage points evidence from a regression discontinuity design suggests that advertising affects election results by altering the partisan composition of the electorate

media and gridlock abstract i develop a model of the relation between the media environment and political obstructionism i show that when voters are less informed by media obstructionism becomes a more effective political signal for the minority party the model thus implies that media change can cause gridlock via signaling by contrast the previous literature on causes of gridlock focuses on polarization and other factors the model also makes several auxiliary predictions consistent with recent trends in u s politics

a new approach to decomposition of economic time series into permanent and transitory components with particular attention to measurement of the business cycle abstract this paper introduces a general procedure for decomposition of non stationary time series into a permanent and transitory component allowing both components to be stochastic the permanent component is shown to be a random walk with drift and the transitory or cyclical component is a stationary process with mean zero the decomposition methodology which depends only on past data and therefore is computable in real time is applied to the problem of measuring and dating business cycles in the portwar u s economy we find that measured expansions and contractions are of roughly equivalent duration and that our dating of cyclical episodes tends to lead the traditional nber dating and to a lesser extent the growth cycle chronology of zarnowitz and boschan 1977

closeness expenditures and turnout in the 1982 u s house elections students of elections have repeatedly found that the closeness of an election is modestly correlated with turnout this may be due to a direct response of instrumentally motivated voters but recent theoretical work casts doubt on the adequacy of this explanation another possibility is that elite actors respond to closeness with greater effort at mobilization we explore the latter possibility by using fec and state data on campaign expenditures in house senate and gubernatorial races our results indicate that closeness has an effect at both the mass and elite levels we also provide quantitative estimates of the effect of senate and gubernatorial expenditure on house turnout

citizen editors endogenous information acquisition and news accuracy abstract this paper provides a model of the market for news where profit maximizing media outlets choose their editors from a population of rational citizens the analysis identifies a novel mechanism of media bias the bias in a media outlet s news reports is the result of the slanted endogenous information acquisition strategy of its editor in particular the results show that the expected accuracy of news reports is lower the more ideological an editor is nevertheless citizens find it optimal to acquire information from a media outlet whose editor has similar ideological preferences depending on the distribution of citizens ideological preferences a media outlet may choose an ideological editor even in a monopolistic market moreover ideological editors are more likely to be present in the market for news i the higher the number of media outlets competing in the market for news ii the lower the opportunity cost that citizens have to incur to acquire information

a re assessment of the relationship between real exchange rates and real interest rates 1974 1990 abstract this paper uses cointegration techniques and error correction models to re examine the link between real exchange rates and real interest rate differentials the results show that real exchange rates and real interest rates are nonstationary however they are not cointegrated with each other on the other hand the dynamic models indicate that there might be a long run relationship between these variables but this cannot be verified the final conclusion is that there is little empirical evidence in support of a systematic relationship and this result is robust across exchange rates time periods and measures of expected inflation

the effect of newspaper entry and exit on electoral politics we use new data on entries and exits of us daily newspapers from 1869 to 2004 to estimate effects on political participation party vote shares and electoral competitiveness our identification strategy exploits the precise timing of these events and allows for the possibility of confounding trends we find that newspapers have a robust positive effect on political participation with one additional newspaper increasing both presidential and congressional turnout by approximately 0 3 percentage points newspaper competition is not a key driver of turnout our effect is driven mainly by the first newspaper in a market and the effect of a second or third paper is significantly smaller the effect on presidential turnout diminishes after the introduction of radio and television while the estimated effect on congressional turnout remains similar up to recent years we find no evidence that partisan newspapers affect party vote shares with confidence intervals that rule out even moderate sized effects we find no clear evidence that newspapers systematically help or hurt incumbents

was it real the exchange rate interest differential relation over the modern floating rate period in this paper we explore the relationship between real exchange rates and real interest rate differentials in the united states germany japan and the united kingdom contrary to theories based on the joint hypothesis that domestic prices are sticky and monetary disturbances are predominant we find little evidence of a stable relationship between real interest rates and real exchange rates we consider both in sample and out of sample tests one hypothesis that is consistent with our findings is that real disturbances such as productivity shocks may be a major source of exchange rate volatility this paper investigates the empirical relationship between major currency real exchange rates and real interest rates over the modern post march 1973 flexible rate experience the exchange rates examined here include the dollar mark dollar yen and dollar pound rates our two major findings are as follows first the data do not indicate a strong correspondence between real interest rate differentials short term or long term and real exchange rates this finding appears to conflict with the predictions of most monetary and portfolio balance models of exchange rate determination though the conflict can be substantially reconciled if aggregate disturbances are primarily real in nature i e changes in productivity tastes etc it is true that in many cases the sign of the estimated exchange rate interest rate differential relationship is consistent with the possible predominance of financial market disturbances but the relationship is not stable enough to be statistically significant second although one does find some evidence of a unit root in both real exchange rates and long term but not shortterm real interest differentials these two series do not appear to be linearly cointegrated hence the nonstationarity or near nonstationarity in the two series cannot be attributed to the same factor in section i we briefly describe a class of small scale monetary models of exchange rate determination the importance of this class of models for empirical work derives from its strong predictions about how the exchange rate will move

explaining voter turnout patterns an information theory voting research is rich in empirical regularities yet a parsimonious theory of voter turnout that can match the facts has proven to be elusive this paper argues that voter turnout patterns can be explained by extending the traditional rational voter model to include limited information a model is presented in which utility maximizing consumers receive higher payoffs from voting the more confident they are of their vote choice the model provides an explanation for the most important cross sectional voter turnout patterns in addition it suggests a novel explanation for the post 1960 decline in u s participation

knowledge is power a theory of information income and welfare spending no voters cast their votes based on perfect information but better educated and richer voters are on average better informed than others we develop a model where the voting mistakes resulting from low political knowledge reduce the weight of poor voters and cause parties to choose political platforms that are better aligned with the preferences of rich voters in us election survey data we find that income is more important in affecting voting behavior for more informed voters than for less informed voters as predicted by the model further in a panel of us states we fi nd that when there is a strong correlation between income and political information congress representatives vote more conservatively which is also in line with our theory

radio s impact on public spending if informed voters receive favorable policies then the invention of a new mass medium may affect government policies since it affects who is informed and who is not these ideas are developed in a voting model the model forms the basis for an empirical investigation of a major new deal relief program implemented in the middle of the expansion period of radio the main empirical finding is that u s counties with many radio listeners received more relief funds more funds were allocated to poor counties with high unemployment but controlling for these and other variables the effects of radio are large and highly significant

media and political persuasion evidence from russia this paper compares electoral outcomes of 1999 parliamentary elections in russia among geographical areas with differential access to the only national tv channel independent from the government it was available to three quarters of russia s population and its signal availability was idiosyncratic conditional on observables independent tv decreased aggregate vote for the government party by 8 9 percentage points increased the combined vote for major opposition parties by 6 3 percentage points and decreased turnout by 3 8 percentage points the probability of voting for opposition parties increased for individuals who watched independent tv even controlling for voting intentions measured one month before elections jel d72 l82 p26

performance competition in local media markets abstract this paper investigates the impact of tax and public service performance on english local government popularity by using data on local property taxes service performance ratings and local election results after the introduction of a system of evaluation of local government performance comprehensive performance assessment the evidence emerging from estimation of a re election equation offers a somewhat more rounded portrait of the voter than the conventional fiscal conservative icon by highlighting the beneficial consequences of public service performance on government popularity and pointing to the role of local media networks the bbc regional television local radio and web network in shaping consensus by spreading tax related information

accounting for exchange rate variability in present value models when the discount factor is near 1 a well known stylized fact about nominal exchange rates among low inflation advanced countries particularly u s exchange rates is that their logs are approximately random walks michael i mussa 1979 is most frequently cited for observing this regularity in a famous pair of papers richard a meese and kenneth rogoff 1983a b found that the structural models of the 1970 s could not beat a random walk in explaining exchange rate movements recently some authors menzie chinn and meese 1995 nelson mark 1995 mark and donggyu sul 2001 have argued that the models can outforecast the random walk at long horizons but a comprehensive recent study by yin wong cheung et al 2003 documents that no model consistently outperforms a random walk why one obvious explanation is that the macroeconomic variables that determine the exchange rate themselves follow random walks if the log of the nominal exchange rate is a linear function of forcing variables that are random walks then it will inherit the random walk property the problem with this explanation is that the economic fundamentals proposed in the most popular models of exchange rates do not in fact follow simple random walks one resolution to this problem is that there may be some other fundamentals ones that have been proposed in some models but are not easily measurable or ones that have not yet been proposed at all that are important in determining exchange rates if these unobserved fundamentals follow random walks and dominate the variation in exchange rate changes then exchange rates will nearly be random walks even if the standard observed fundamentals are not in engel and west 2003a hereinafter ew we propose an alternative explanation we consider linear models of the exchange rate that are in the asset market approach to exchange rates these models emphasize the role of expectations of future economic fundamentals in determining the current exchange rate the exchange rate expressed as the home currency price of foreign currency in this paper can be written as a discounted sum of the current and expected future fundamentals

international macroeconomic fluctuations and the current account intertemporal models of the current account generally assume that global shocks do not affect the current account we use this assumption to identify global and country specific shocks in a bivariate var we test the quality of the identification using evidence from g7 data in accordance with the theory we observe a link between the global shock and a measure of the world real interest rate we also find that long term output growth is driven by global factors in most countries that country specific shocks are less persistent in smaller economies and generally less volatile than global shocks

abstention in elections with asymmetric information and diverse preferences we analyze a model of a two candidate election with costless voting in which voters have asymmetric information and diverse preferences we demonstrate that a strictly positive fraction of the electorate will abstain and that nevertheless elections effectively aggregate voters private information using examples we show that more informed voters are more likely to vote than their less informed counterparts increasing the fraction of the electorate that is informed however may lead to higher levels of abstention we conclude by showing that a biased distribution of information can lead to a biased voting population but does not lead to biased outcomes

television and voter turnout i use variation across markets in the timing of television s introduction to identify its impact on voter turnout the estimated effect is significantly negative accounting for between a quarter and a half of the total decline in turnout since the 1950s i argue that substitution away from other media with more political coverage provides a plausible mechanism linking television to voting as evidence for this i show that the entry of television in a market coincided with sharp drops in consumption of newspapers and radio and in political knowledge as measured by election surveys i also show that both the information and turnout effects were largest in off year congressional elections which receive extensive coverage in newspapers but little or no coverage on television

media slant against foreign owners downsizing abstract using a unique data set from nationally distributed quality newspapers in germany we find evidence for both quantitative and qualitative media slant against foreign firms a downsizing foreign firm receives almost twice as much attention as a domestic firm and the tone of media reports is more negative media slant is a measure for economic xenophobia directed against foreign owners which constitutes an obstacle to foreign direct investment

get out the costly vote institutional design for greater participation institutions designed to increase turnout appeal to democratic sentiments but are highly debated as they entail two potentially countervailing eects while generating more pieces of information they may decrease the average voter s information quality we examine two commonly discussed institutions inducing participation abstention penalties used in 32 countries around the world and lotteries providing a prize to one randomly chosen participant as proposed on the 2006 arizona ballot we analyze a benchmark rational choice model in which voters vary in their information quality and participation is costly we illustrate that both institutions can improve collective outcomes though lotteries are a more eective instrument asymptotically in an array of lab experiments we empirically assess institutional performance we nd strong evidence for selective participation lab voters participate more when better informed or when institutionally induced however because subjects vote more often than the equilibrium predictions these institutions entail less welfare benets than theory prescribes lotteries do fare better than nes suggesting that they may be a useful alternative to commonly used compulsory

how segregated is urban consumption we provide measures of ethnic and racial segregation in urban consumption using yelp reviews we estimate how spatial and social frictions influence restaurant visits within new york city transit

mass media competition political competition and public policy if better informed voters receive favourable policies then mass media will affect policy because mass media provide most of the information people use in voting this paper models the incentives of the media to deliver news to different groups the increasing returns to scale technology and advertising financing of media firms induce them to provide more news to large groups such as taxpayers and dispersed consumer interests and groups that are valuable to advertisers this news bias alters the tradeoff in political competition and therefore introduces a bias in public policy the paper also discusses the effects of broadcast media replacing newspapers as the main information source about politics the model predicts that this change should raise spending on government programmes used by poor and rural voters

follow the leader theory and evidence on political participation using state by state voting data for u s presidential elections the authors observe that voter turnout is a positive function of predicted closeness to explain the strategic component of political participation they develop a follow the leader model political leaders expend effort according to their chance of being pivotal which depends on the expected closeness of the race at both state and national levels and how voters respond to their effort structural estimation supports this model for example a 1 percent increase in the predicted closeness at the state level stimulates leaders efforts which increases turnout by 0 34 percent

the swing voter s curse the authors analyze two candidate elections in which some voters are uncertain about the realization of a state variable that affects the utility of all voters they demonstrate the existence of a swing voter s curse less informed indifferent voters strictly prefer to abstain rather than vote for either candidate even when voting is costless the swing voter s curse leads to the equilibrium result that a substantial fraction of the electorate will abstain even though all abstainers strictly prefer voting for one candidate over voting for another copyright 1996 by american economic association