voter turnout and fiscal policy abstract in this paper we examine whether shocks in voting costs can impact elected representatives quality defined as the capacity to fund projects at the lowest cost using data on french municipalities and local variations in seasonal infections incidence as a shock on voting cost we estimate that higher incidence lowers voter turnout increases subsidies obtained by a municipality decreases harmful financial decisions and increases the municipality s investment in infrastructure we present a model where these predictions would hold in particular for municipalities with a high base level of turnout

two party competition with persistent policies abstract when campaigning for reelection incumbent parties promises to voters are constrained by their records in office while opposition parties can use their time away from power to develop new platforms in this paper i introduce incumbent policy persistence in a dynamic game of electoral competition between two policy motivated parties and characterise the long run outcomes of its markov perfect equilibria incumbents reduced policy flexibility leads to alternation in power and policy dynamics that converge to alternations at policies equally preferred by the median voter convergence of policies towards the median is a robust equilibrium outcome while convergence to the median is not while alternations far from the median are never limits of equilibrium dynamics alternations close to the median can be reached only if policy dynamics start exactly there i show that these results are robust to voters being forward looking and to limited policy commitment by parties

cycles in politics wavelet analysis of political time series spectral analysis and arma models have been the most common weapons of choice for the detection of cycles in political time series controversies about cycles however tend to revolve around an issue that both techniques are badly equipped to address the possibility of irregular cycles without fixed periodicity throughout the entire time series this has led to two main consequences on the one hand proponents of cyclical theories have often dismissed established statistical techniques on the other hand proponents of established techniques have dismissed the possibility of cycles without fixed periodicity wavelets allow the detection of transient and coexisting cycles and structural breaks in periodicity in this article we present the tools of wavelet analysis and apply them to the study of two lingering puzzles in the political science literature the existence of cycles in election returns in the united states and in the severity of major power wars

out of step out of office electoral accountability and house members voting does a typical house member need to worry about the electoral ramifications of his roll call decisions we investigate the relationship between incumbents electoral performance and roll call support for their party controlling for district ideology challenger quality and campaign spending among other factors through a series of tests of the 1956 1996 elections the tests produce three key findings indicating that members are indeed accountable for their legislative voting first in each election an incumbent receives a lower vote share the more he supports his party second this effect is comparable in size to that of other widely recognized electoral determinants third a member s probability of retaining office decreases as he offers increased support for his party and this relationship holds for not only marginal but also safe members

political dynasties and the incumbency advantage in party centered environments a handful of recent studies have investigated the causal effect of incumbency on dynasty formation in candidate centered electoral contexts we use candidate level data and a regression discontinuity design to estimate the incumbency advantage and its relation to dynasty formation in the party centered closed list proportional representation setting of norway the results indicate that the incumbency advantage exists even in this party centered environment however in contrast to recent findings for the united states and the philippines we find no evidence that incumbency is important to the formation of dynasties this finding underscores the need for more research into the role of internal party organizational networks in the perpetuation of political dynasties

the glass ceiling in politics formalization and empirical tests there is a scarcity of women at the apex of political power as well as a lack of methods to disentangle the potential sources of this under representation this article suggests a four step method to test for whether women s under representation can be explained by the existence of a glass ceiling we emphasize that this concept implies discrimination in promotions within the political organization that the discriminatory promotions increase in severity at the top levels of power and that they increase in severity during an individual s career trajectory the proposed method is applied to subnational politics in sweden a long standing world leader in women s descriptive representation the results support the conjecture that a glass ceiling is hindering elected women s rise to political power in this context

the looks of a winner beauty and electoral success abstract we study the role of beauty in politics using candidate photos that figured prominently in electoral campaigns our investigation is based on visual assessments of 1929 finnish political candidates from 10 011 respondents of which 3708 were finnish as finland has a proportional electoral system we are able to compare the electoral success of non incumbent candidates representing the same party an increase in our measure of beauty by one standard deviation is associated with an increase of 20 in the number of votes for the average non incumbent parliamentary candidate the relationship is unaffected by including education and occupation as control variables and withstands several other robustness checks

incumbency advantages in the canadian parliament we apply a regression discontinuity approach to determine incumbency advantages in the canadian parliament finding that incumbents enjoy a 9 4 11 2 increased probability of winning over non incumbents owing to the presence of multiple parties an incumbency advantage in terms of vote share does not always translate to an increased probability of winning because incumbents do not necessarily obtain votes from their closest opponent also under the assumption that strategic exit is not an issue we are able to split the incumbency advantage into party incumbency and individual candidate incumbency components finding that the advantage is almost entirely due to the individual on utilise une approche par la methode de regression avec discontinuite pour determiner les avantages qu il y a aetre l elu en place dans les elections au parlement du canada on decouvre que les elus en place ont une probabilite de gagner de 9 4 a 11 2 de plus que leurs adversaires a cause de la presence de multiples partis politiques l avantage de l elu en place en termes de proportion du vote ne se traduit pas toujours par une probabilite accrue de gagner parce que les elus en place ne capturent pas necessairement les votes de leur plus proche adversaire de plus en presumant qu il ne s agit pas de sortie strategique on peut departager l avantage de l elu en place en composantes correspondant a l effet de parti et l effet de l individu on decouvre que l avantage est presque completement attribuable a l individu

a monetary policy strategy in good and bad times lessons from the recent past we evaluate the ecb s monetary policy strategy against some of the underlying economic features of the eurozone in normal times and during the financial crisis we show that in the years preceding the crisis the ecb s emphasis on monetary indicators and deliberate avoidance of excessive activism were justified by the underlying macroeconomic conditions that the ecb faced in the eurozone and contributed to avoid more volatile patterns of inflation and economic activity after the collapse of financial intermediation in late 2008 the strategy of the ecb was to adopt several non standard policy measures according to our quantitative evaluation of the impact of the main non standard policies decided in october 2008 and in may 2009 which notably did not include entering commitments regarding the future path of the policy rate such measures have significantly contributed to preserving price stability and forestalling a more disruptive collapse of the macroeconomy stephan fahr roberto motto massimo rostagno frank smets and oreste tristani

caps on political lobbying the cost of political campaigns in the u s has risen substantially in recent years for example real spending on congressional election campaigns doubled between 1976 and 1992 steven d levitt 1995 there are many reasons why increased campaign spending might be socially harmful first increased spending means increased fund raising which may keep politicians from their legislative duties 1 second a lobbyist who makes a large campaign contribution may have undue influence on electoral outcomes on the shaping of legislation or on the outcome of regulatory proceedings 2 that is the socially preferred candidate or legislation may not prevail likewise a lobbyist involved in a regulatory matter or a competition for a government contract may benefit unduly from a legislator s intervention 3 third a perception that campaign contributions purchase influence may lead to increased tolerance of corruption in the private sector a desire to control campaign spending has spawned many initiatives to limit both campaign contributions and spending beginning with the passage of the federal election campaign act feca political action committees pacs can contribute at most 5 000 per election to a candidate while individuals can contribute at most 1 000 restrictions have also been put on in kind contributions making it more difficult to circumvent these limits 4 while direct restrictions on campaign spending have proven difficult to implement recent initiatives aim to impose voluntary spending limits and stricter limits on contributions 5 despite the existing legislation and the proposals to limit contributions little is known about the impact of contribution limits on aggregate expenditures while it is intuitively appealing that aggregate expenditures would drop we challenge that intuition here we study a lobbying game and show that a cap on individual lobbyists expenditures may have the perverse effect of increasing aggregate expenditures and loweri this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item

tracing the causes of the banking crisis we add the bernanke gertler gilchrist model to a modified version of the smets wouters model of the u s in order to explore the causes of the banking crisis the innovation of this article is estimating the model using unfiltered data allowing for non stationary shocks in order to replicate how the model predicts the crisis we find that traditional shocks account for most of the fluctuations in macroeconomic variables the non stationarity of the productivity shock plays a key role crises occur when there is a run of bad shocks based on this sample they occur on average once every 64 years and when they occur around 10 are accompanied by financial crisis financial shocks on their own even when extreme do not cause crises provided the government acts swiftly to counteract such a shock as happened in this sample

the incumbency effects of signalling much literature on political behaviour treats politicians as motivated by re election choosing actions to signal their types to voters we identify a novel implication of incumbent signalling because incumbents only care about clearing a re election hurdle signals will tend to cluster just above the threshold needed for re election this generates a skew distribution of signals leading to an incumbency advantage in the probability of election we also solve for the optimal threshold when voters have the ability to commit

a statistical model for multiparty electoral data we propose an internally consistent and comprehensive statistical model for analyzing multiparty district level aggregate election data this model can be used to explain or predict how the geographic distribution of electoral results depends upon economic conditions neighborhood ethnic compositions campaign spending and other features of the election campaign or characteristics of the aggregate areas we also provide several new graphical representations for help in data exploration model evaluation and substantive interpretation although the model applies more generally we use it to help resolve an important controversy over the size of and trend in the electoral advantage of incumbency in great britain contrary to previous analyses which are all based on measures now known to be biased we demonstrate that the incumbency advantage is small but politically meaningful we also find that it differs substantially across the parties about half a percent for the conservatives 1 for the labor party and 3 for the liberal party and its successors also contrary to previous research we show that these effects have not grown in recent years finally we are able to estimate from which party each party s incumbency advantage is predominantly drawn

political selection and persistence of bad governments we study dynamic selection of governments under different political institutions with a special focus on institutional flexibility a government consists of a subset of the individuals in the society the competence level of the government in office determines collective utilities e g by determining the amount and quality of public goods and each individual derives additional utility from being part of the government e g rents from holding office we characterize the dynamic evolution of governments and determine the structure of stable governments which arise and persist in equilibrium in our model perfect democracy where current members of the government do not have veto power over changes in governments always leads to the emergence of the most competent government however any deviation from perfect democracy to any regime with incumbency veto power destroys this result there is always at least one other less competent government that is also stable and can persist forever and even the least competent government can persist forever in office we also show that there is a nonmonotonic relationship between the degree of incumbency veto power and the quality of government in contrast in the presence of stochastic shocks or changes in the environment a regime with less incumbency veto power has greater flexibility and greater probability that high competence governments will come to power this result suggests that a particular advantage of democratic regimes with a limited number of veto players may be their greater adaptability to changes rather than their performance under given conditions finally we show that royalty like dictatorships may be more successful than junta like dictatorships because in these regimes veto players are less afraid of change

zombie lending and depressed restructuring in japan this paper explores the role that misdirected bank lending played in prolonging the japanese macroeconomic stagnation that began in the early 1990s the investigation focuses on the wide spread practice of japanese banks of continuing to lend to otherwise insolvent firms we docu ment the prevalence of this forbearance lending and show its distorting effects on healthy firms that were competing with the impaired firms the paper by hoshi 2000 was the first to call attention to this phenomenon and its ramifi

forecasting efficiency concepts and applications this article introduces the concept of forecast efficiency in which the forecast contains all information available at the time of the forecast empirical tests investigate weak efficiency where the information set is all past forecasts and where all forecast revisions and errors should be uncorrelated with past forecast revisions tests of macroeconomic energy consumption and oil price forecasts find a significant autocorrelation of forecast revisions with fifty of fifty one tests showing positive correlation of forecast revisions as opposed to zero correlation consistent with forecast efficiency copyright 1987 by mit press

a natural experiment in proposal power and electoral success does lawmaker behavior influence electoral outcomes observational studies cannot elucidate the effect of legislative proposals on electoral outcomes since effects are confounded by unobserved differences in legislative and political skill we take advantage of a unique natural experiment in the canadian house of commons that allows us to estimate how proposing legislation affects election outcomes the right of noncabinet members to propose legislation is assigned by lottery comparing outcomes between those who were granted the right to propose and those who were not we show that incumbents of the governing party enjoy a 2 7 percentage point bonus in vote total in the election following their winning the right to introduce a single piece of legislation which translates to a 7 increase in the probability of winning the causal effect results from higher likeability among constituents these results demonstrate experimentally that what politicians do as lawmakers has a causal effect on electoral outcomes

monetary policy and bank lending in the euro area is there a stock market channel or an interest rate channel abstract in this paper i compare a traditional demand oriented model of bank lending with its focus on short term interest rates in the money market to a non traditional capital budgeting model of bank lending based on movements in share valuations for the euro area using non nested hypothesis tests omitted variables tests and granger causality tests i reject the traditional demand oriented model of bank lending and fail to reject the capital budgeting model of bank lending for monetary financial institutions mfi s in the euro area even though europe is a bank based financial system it appears the stock market plays a key role in the lending decisions and allocation of resources in europe one possible policy implication of this research is that the central bank should try and stabilize stock prices in order to achieve their goal of stabilizing bank lending and the economy

the macroeconomic effects of large scale asset purchase programmes the effects of asset purchase programs on macroeconomic variables are likely to be moderate we reach this conclusion after simulating the impact of the federal reserve s second large scale asset purchase program lsap ii in a dsge model enriched with a preferred habitat framework and estimated on u s data our simulations suggest that such a program increases gdp growth by less than half a percentage point although the effect on the level of gdp is very persistent the program s marginal contribution to infl ation is very small one key reason for our fi ndings is that we estimate a small degree of fi nancial market segmentation if we enrich the set of observables with a measure of long term debt the semi elasticity of the risk premium to the amount of debt in privatesector hands is substantially smaller than that reported in the recent empirical literature in this case our baseline estimates of the effects of lsap ii on the macroeconomy decrease by at least a factor of two throughout the analysis a commitment to an extended period at the zero lower bound for nominal interest rates increases the effects of asset purchase programs on gdp growth and infl ation

the marginals never vanished incumbency and competition in elections to the u s house of representatives 1952 82 the average vote margin enjoyed by incumbent candidates for the u s house of representatives increased sharply during the 1 960s despite this and contrary to assumptions common in the literature on recent congressional elections electoral data show that house incumbents are no safer now than they were in the 1950s the marginals properly defined have not vanished the swing ratio has diminished little if at all and competition for house seats held by incumbents has not declined vote margins increased without adding to incumbent security diminishing competition or dampening swings because the heterogeneity of interelection vote swings increased at the same time

electoral contributions and the cost of unpopularity when considering electoral campaigns candidates receiving contributions from relatively unpopular industries should be regarded less favorably by voters that have information on the sources of funding to offset this unpopularity effect politicians may either demand more money for campaign advertising from these industries in order to persuade less informed voters or shy away from unpopular contributors to avoid losing the support of the informed electorate our model predicts that the first effect dominates and electoral contributions are increasing in industry unpopularity by using u s house elections data and different identification strategies we provide robust evidence in favor of our predictions jel d72 p16

the role of central bank transparency for guiding private sector forecasts central banks have become remarkably more transparent over the last few decades in this paper we study the effects of this evolution focusing on whether enhanced central bank transparency lowers dispersion among professional forecasters of key economic variables we use a large set of proxies for central bank transparency in 12 advanced economies we find evidence for a sizeable effect e g by announcing a quantified inflation objective or by publishing inflation and output forecasts however there are decreasing marginal effects to increases in transparency and the disagreement among the expectations of the general public is not affected this suggests that there are possible limits to transparency

incumbency advantage and political campaign spending limits abstract this paper presents a model which captures the three main arguments for and against campaign spending limits campaign spending limits are purported to restrict the incumbent s ability to exploit his fundraising advantage in contrast to conventional wisdom a ceiling increases the incumbent s probability of victory regardless of the candidates relative fundraising abilities as long as the challenger is not more effective in campaign spending if the challenger is more effective in campaign spending ceilings have a non monotonic effect when the incumbent enjoys a mild initial voter disposition advantage a moderate ceiling decreases the incumbent s probability of victory but further restricting the limit favors the incumbent irrespective of incumbency status the marginal benefit to quality decreases with a more restrictive cap in an open seat contest a more restrictive limit improves the electoral prospects of the superior quality candidate stricter ceilings may lead to the unintended consequence of increased expected spending

constituency opinion and congressional policy making the reagan defense buildup representatives votes on a series of defense budget roll calls in the first year of the reagan administration s pentagon buildup are related to constituency opinions on defense spending during the 1980 election campaign the strong aggregate constituency demand for increased defense spending in 1980 is estimated to have added almost 17 billion about 10 to the total fiscal year 1982 pentagon appropriation the impact of constituency opinion was largely independent of specific political circumstances differential responsiveness in districts with partisan turnover intense districtlevel competition and strong presidential coattails together accounted for less than 1 billion in additional appropriations with the remaining 16 billion attributable to across the board responsiveness by even the most safely incumbent representatives t he appeal of representative democracy hinges on the responsiveness of elected politicians to the preferences and interests of their constituents given the theoretical and practical significance of the connection between constituents opinions and their representatives legislative activities it is remarkable that the large and in some ways quite sophisticated empirical literature addressing this connection includes so few direct estimates of the relationship between constituency opinion and specific legislative outcomes 1 my aim here is to provide one such estimate the policy issue i have chosen to examine is the level of total pentagon spending in the first fy 1982 defense appropriations bill of the reagan administration that bill the first in a series of annual appropriations resulting in a 40 real increase in defense spending during reagan s first five years in office is of obvious political significance but the issue of defense spending is also especially interesting from a broader theoretical perspective because the strong public demand for a defense spending increase at the beginning of the reagan era provides unusual analytical leverage for assessing the potential impact of public opinion on the making of public policy i shall describe some alternative mechanisms of congressional responsiveness to constituency opinion briefly characterize the politics of defense at the beginning of the reagan era present my analysis of representatives preferences regarding fy 1982 defense appropriations relating those preferences to constituency opinions on the defense spending issue and to other political characteristics of the representatives and their districts extend the analysis of fy 1982 defense appropriations from the individual to the aggregate level in an attempt to estimate the impact of congressional responsiveness on the total level of pentagon appropriations and finally touch upon some of the implications of my analysis for the study of linkages between public opinion and public policy

leviathan in the crosshairs following in the spirit of the leviathan hypothesis this paper empirically examines how the degree of local government market power influences efficiency in the local public sector market power is measured by the number and relative size distribution of similar government units in the same market area to avoid confusing market power with the comparative efficiency or superiority of larger sized organizations the relative size distribution of the individual government unit is held constant in the empirical analysis in the empirical test aggregate property values serve as the measure of efficiency the empirical results suggest that aggregate property values are lower and thus efficiency suffers in more concentrated municipal market areas ceteris paribus thus providing some evidence for leviathan type governments in connecticut

changes in the vote margins for congressional candidates a specification of historical trends recent research on house elections has focused on the decline in congressional competition since the mid 1960s however this body of research suffers from three major problems 1 an imprecise specification of the nature of change in the degree of congressional competition 2 its exclusive reliance on a limited time frame which calls into question the generalizability and adequacy of its explanations and 3 its overemphasis on incumbency oriented explanations using a multiple interrupted time series mits analysis of trends in aggregate electoral data from 1824 to 1980 we find that current low levels of congressional competition are not historically unique but instead constitute a continuation of a long term trend established in the mid 1890s in addition and in contrast to the general thrust described in the literature there appears to be a post 1965 trend toward greater competition although the absolute level of competition is lower after the mid 1960s finally a disaggregation of electoral results by incumbency status suggests a growth in the incumbency advantage since the mid 1890s but that lower post 1965 levels of congressional competition are the result of a winners and not an incumbency advantage such findings cast doubt on the adequacy of explanations that focus on post 1965 incumbency oriented factors

looking beyond reelection revising assumptions about the factors motivating congressional behavior this paper challenges the assumption inherent in most models of legislative behavior namely that congressmen are driven by the desire for reelection i offer an alternative perspective incumbents seek to maximize their discretionary investments and the income generated by the job the only constraint on this behavior is that legislators provide a satisfactory level of constituency service a product that i suggest entails slight opportunity and few manufacturing costs for congressmen and one that is unlikely to lose its value with increased production i also demonstrate that increases in salary and discretionary investments have lengthened congressional careers

incumbent challenger and open seat elections in a spatial model of political competition in groseclose am j political sci 45 862 886 2001 candidates with asymmetric valence scores and varying degrees of policy motivation simultaneously choose divergent policies i take a version of the groseclose model with policy motivated candidates and extend it to allow for sequential policy announcements this may be a suitable approach for incumbent challenger elections because the incumbent s policy is typically known before the challenger s i show that policy divergence is greater when candidates announce policies sequentially as opposed to simultaneously i also show that policy motivated incumbents benefit from a first mover advantage

win lose or withdraw a categorical analysis of career patterns in the house of representatives 1948 1978 the literature on incumbency advantage has focused on margin as an indicator for electoral security but while electoral margin is a goodex ante measure it is a poorex post measure of security further existing work has not integrated the choice of retirement with changes in the level of security to improve the specification and definition of marginality a multinomial logit model is proposed where the dependent variable is categorical account is therefore taken of all the ways a representative s term in office can end including reelection defeat retirement or pursuit of other office the sample includes all u s representatives elected for the first time between 1948 and 1978 the results indicate that 1 margin in the previous election is a significantex ante proxy for the probability of electoral defeat and 2 while the electoral safety of all incumbents in the house has been increased the increases are greater for members elected for the first time in the period since 1965

designing monetary policy committees we integrate monetary policy making by committee into a new keynesian model to assess the consequences of the committee s institutional characteristics for inflation output and welfare our analysis delivers the following results first we demonstrate that transparency about the committee s future composition is typically harmful second we show that short terms for central bankers lead to effective inflation stabilization at the expense of comparably high output variability third larger committees generally allow for more efficient stabilization of inflation but possibly for less efficient output stabilization fourth large committees and short terms are therefore socially desirable if the weight on output stabilization in the social loss function is low fifth we show that a central banker with random preferences may be preferable to a central banker who shares the preferences of society

preferential resource spending under an employment guarantee the political economy of mgnregs in andhra pradesh are ostensibly demand driven public works programs with high levels of safeguards nonetheless susceptible to political influence this conjecture is investigated using expenditure data at the local level from india s national rural employment guarantee scheme focusing on one state where accountability and transparency mechanisms have been employed and implementation efforts have been widely applauded there is no evidence of partisan influenced spending before the 2009 election however a statistically significant but small in magnitude effect after the 2009 election most variation in public works expenditures is explained by the observed needs of potential beneficiaries as the scheme intended

what does a financial shock do first international evidence in this paper we attempt to evaluate the quantitative impact of financial shocks on key indicators of real activity and financial conditions we focus on financial shocks as they have received wide attention in the recent literature and in the policy debate after the global financial crisis we estimate a panel var for 21 advanced economies based on quarterly data between 1985 and 2011 where financial shocks are identified through sign restrictions we find robust evidence that financial shocks can be separately identified from other shock types and that they exert a significant influence on key macroeconomic variables such as gdp and particularly investment but it is unclear whether these shocks are demand or supply shocks from the standpoint of their macroeconomic impact the financial development and structure of a given country is found not to matter much for the intensity of the propagation of financial shocks moreover we generally find that these shocks play a role not only in crisis times but also in normal conditions finally we discuss the implications of our findings for monetary policy fabio fornari and livio stracca

the quality of political institutions and the curse of natural resources we propose a theoretical model to explain empirical regularities related to the curse of natural resources which emphasises the behaviour and incentives of politicians we extend the standard voting model to give voters political control beyond the elections this gives rise to a new restriction that policies should not give rise to a revolution our model clarifies when resource discoveries might lead to revolutions namely in countries with weak institutions it also suggests that for bad political institutions human capital depends negatively on natural resources while for high institutional quality the dependence is reversed this finding is corroborated in cross section regressions

forecasting urea prices abstractmanaging urea price risk is a concern of firms in the urea supply chain due to high price volatility and relatively slow transportation this study develops urea price forecasting models as a way to reduce price risk the forecasting models are evaluated based on multiple accuracy measures and compared to fertilizer week a commercial forecast an autoregressive model with exogenous variables arx using a window size of 48 months outperforms the other models no statistical difference exists between our best model and fertilizer week encompassing tests show that a combination model using the two models outperforms using fertilizer week forecasts alone a combined model using 66 8 of fertilzerweekand 33 2 of the arx brings about the minimum forecast error

do several winning coalitions exist in a state for senators of the same party evidence from an event study we argue that u s senators from the same state and in the same party form different winning coalitions we also develop a theory that stipulates that parties encourage these senators to form very distinct constituency coalitions parties use committee assignments as a carrot to give these senators an incentive to represent different groups in our empirical analysis we find that there are fewer overlapping committee assignments among senators in the same state when they are from the same party we also consider the case of john heinz and arlen specter both pennsylvania republicans when john heinz died in a plane crash political action committees pacs that bought influence from specter but not heinz now had the possibility that the new senator replacing heinz would include them in his resource constituency the resulting competition by the new pennsylvania senator and specter for campaign resources would lower the price these firms had to pay for representation thus improving their expected future earnings

barriers to competition and the effect on political shirking 1953 1992 economists and political scientists have offered a variety of explanations for why legislators might rationally choose to ignore the preferences of their constituents political parties and presidents the broad conclusion of this literature is that there is an element of shirking in congressional voting the objective of this paper is to suggest that the effects of shirking in congressional voting may have increased over time largely in response to the raising of barriers to competition in congressional elections thereby enabling legislators to vote their own preferences without fear of losing reelection we use a quasi experimental design that controls for the effects of party region electoral safety presidential control of the white house and constituency factors in isolating the causal effects of barriers to entry on a continuous series of roll calls regarding the raising of the debt limit between 1953 and 1992 we find that shirking in legislative voting on debt limit legislation is a post 1970s phenomenon

old voters new voters and the personal vote using redistricting to estimate the incumbency advantage we provide new estimates of the size of the personal vote in u s house elections from 1872 to 1990 we take advantage of the natural experiment that attends decennial redistricting every ten years most incumbents are given new districts that contain a combination of old and new territory by contrasting an incombent s vote in the new part of the district with his or her vote in the old part of the district we can estimate the magnitude of the personal vote the vote that the incumbent receives because he or she represented the voters in the past our estimates confirm prior work that shows that a large fraction of the incumbency advantage owes to the personal vote as opposed to challenger quality unlike past research we are able to estimate the relationship between district partisanship and the personal vote we find a significant interaction which shows that incumbents develop larger personal votes in areas where they are electorally most vulnerable here is no doubt that incumbents today have a substantial advantage over nonincumbents in u s house elections the overall size of this advantage has been fairly well established as has the fact that incumbents electoral strength has increased dramatically over the postwar period measured in terms of vote share the overall incumbency advantage grew from a modest 1 3 percentage point edge in the 1940s and early 1950s to a 7 10 percentage point edge in the 1980s and early 1990s 1 there is much less agreement about the sources of the incumbency advantage and the causes of its growth congressional scholars have identified a variety of factors that may be responsible which can be grouped into three broad categories the first and the focus of this paper is electoral advantage that stems from a legislator s homestyle members of the house are reputedly very responsive to their constituents in turn their constituents reward them with their votes mayhew 1974b fenno 1974 and others detail the sorts of activities that legislators do to build a widely known and respected name including casework frequent visits to the district position taking on issues and securing federal benefits a second source of the incumbency advantage is candidate quality incumbents may win because they are the best candidates running and they do noticeably worse when they face state legislators and other experienced challengers finally incumbency may simply act as a voting cue a label which voters rely on because party has become less relevant assessing the importance of these different factors has significant implications for our normative evaluations of the modern congress and our understanding

monetary policy in exceptional times this paper describes the way in which the european central bank ecb the federal reserve and the bank of england conducted monetary policy since the beginning of the financial crisis in august 2007 we argue that both quantitative easing and the other non standard measures introduced by central banks that changed the composition of the asset side of their balance sheets so called qualitative easing acted mainly through their effects on interest rates and in particular on money market spreads rather than solely through quantity effects in terms of the money supply we perform a quantitative exercise on the euro area which estimates the effect of the reduction of these spreads to the broader economy michele lenza huw pill and lucrezia reichlin

incumbency effects in political campaigns in this paper we examine two effects of incumbency first an incumbent may have an advantage in creating a favorable image in the eyes of the voters second the incumbent may have to chose a position before the challenger this second aspect of incumbency is modelled as stackelberg leadership in the model two candidates run for election by choosing a position in an ideological spectrum voters care about candidates chosen positions as well as non policy attributes of candidates which we call charisma charismata are not known when candidates choose policy positions they are only revealed on election day so that winning is not usually a certain prospect candidates care about the probability of winning but they also dislike compromising their own ideals

declining electoral competitiveness in the house of representatives the differential impact of improved transportation technology this paper advances the hypothesis that improvements in the national transportation and communication infrastructure are responsible for the vanishing marginals or the increased electoral security of u s representatives we assume that margin and security are directly affected by the amount of time a legislator or a member of her staff devotes to direct contact with constituents in the home district formally we demonstrate that a decline in the time opportunity cost associated with travel to the district improves victory margins where we proxy improvement in transportation technology by using a distance variable across three different historical samples 1890 1928 and 1970 this proposition offers a potentially more fundamental explanation of declining electoral competition than existing explanations focusing on professionalism careerism redistricting and bureaucratic casework in fact the technology communication hypothesis may well encompass such explanations the model specified here offers at best a crude test of the hypothesis that technology and communication are the cause of the vanishing marginals a superior test would include the actual time required to travel to each district in each sample year because a closer but more inaccessible location would be less electorally favorable according to the logic underlying our model while distance is therefore an imperfect proxy we are encouraged by the results of the preliminary test the next step for future research is to identify which technological innovations have had the greatest impact in order to accomplish this a more complete model of the link between legislators and constituents must be established

should central banks respond to movements in asset prices in recent decades asset booms and busts have been important factors in macroeconomic fluctuations in both industrial and developing countries in light of this experience how if at all should central bankers respond to asset price volatility we have addressed this issue in previous work bernanke and gertler 1999 the context of our earlier study was the relatively new but increasingly popular monetary policy framework known as inflation targeting see e g bernanke and frederic mishkin 1997 in an inflation targeting framework publicly announced medium term inflation targets provide a nominal anchor for monetary policy while allowing the central bank some flexibility to help stabilize the real economy in the short run the inflation targeting approach gives a specific answer to the question of how central bankers should respond to asset prices changes in asset prices should affect monetary policy only to the extent that they affect the central bank s forecast of inflation to a first approximation once the predictive content of asset prices for inflation has been accounted for there should be no additional response of monetary policy to assetprice fluctuations in use now for about a decade inflationtargeting has generally performed well in practice however so far this approach has not often been stress tested by large swings in asset prices our earlier research employed simulations of a small calibrated macroeconomic model to examine how an inflation targeting policy defined as one in which the central bank s instrument interest rate responds primarily to changes in expected inflation might fare in the face of a boom and bust cycle in asset prices we found that an aggressive inflationtargeting policy rule in our simulations one in which the coefficient relating the instrument interest rate to expected inflation is 2 0 substantially stabilizes both output and inflation in scenarios in which a bubble in stock prices develops and then collapses as well as in scenarios in which technology shocks drive stock prices intuitively inflation targeting central banks automatically accommodate productivity gains that lift stock prices while offsetting purely speculative increases or decreases in stock values whose primary effects are through aggregate demand conditional on a strong policy response to expected inflation we found little if any additional gains from allowing an independent response of central bank policy to the level of asset prices in our view there are good reasons outside of our formal model to worry about attempts by central banks to influence asset prices including the fact that as history has shown the effects of such attempts on market psychology are dangerously unpredictable hence we concluded that inflationtargeting central banks need not respond to asset prices except insofar as they affect the inflation forecast in the spirit of recent work on robust control the exercises in our earlier paper analyzed the performance of policy rules in worst case discussants robert shiller yale university glenn rudebusch federal reserve bank of san francisco kenneth rogoff harvard university

why did the incumbency advantage in u s house elections grow theory a simple rational entry argument suggests that the value of incumbency consists not just of a direct effect reflecting the value of resources such as staff attached to legislative office but also of an indirect effect reflecting the fact that stronger challengers are less likely to contest incumbent held seats the indirect effect is the product of a scare off effect the ability of incumbents to scare off high quality challengers and a quality effect reflecting how much electoral advantage a party accrues when it has an experienced rather than an inexperienced candidate hypothesis the growth of the overall incumbency advantage was driven principally by increases in the quality effect methods we use a simple two equation model estimated by ordinary least squares regression to analyze u s house election data from 1948 to 1990 results most of the increase in the incumbency advantage at least down to 1980 came through increases in the quality effect i e the advantage to the incumbent party of having a low quality challenger this suggests that the task for those wishing to explain the growth in the vote denominated incumbency advantage is to explain why the quality effect grew it also suggests that resource based explanations of the growth in the incumbency advantage cannot provide a full explanation

political influence in the distribution of agricultural disaster payments this paper examines the impact of committee membership and electoral votes on the distribution of ad hoc agricultural disaster payments across u s counties our results show that both house oversi

climbing the ranks incumbency effects in party list systems abstract incumbents tend to have a solid electoral advantage in candidate centered electoral settings do similar incumbency effects exist in more party centered environments we estimate incumbency effects in an open list proportional representation system exploiting that seats are first allocated across parties and then to candidates within party lists using data from norwegian local elections 2003 2015 we document that a candidate that barely wins a seat in the local council has about a 9 percentage points 43 higher probability of being elected in the next election compared to a candidate that just misses out on a seat on the same party list we find no evidence that voters contribute to this personal incumbency advantage rather it seems as if party elites are instrumental in securing the electoral success of their party affiliates we show that incumbents and non incumbents run again in the subsequent election at about equal rates but that incumbents tend to advance in the party hierarchy and obtain safer ballot positions in future elections which is what ultimately leads to electoral success

shocks structures or monetary policies the euro area and us after 2001 abstract the us federal reserve cut interest rates more vigorously in the recent recession than the european central bank did by comparison with the fed the ecb followed a more measured course of action we use an estimated dynamic general equilibrium model with financial frictions to show that comparisons based on such simple metrics as the variance of policy rates are misleading we find that because there is greater inertia in the ecb s policy rule the ecb s policy actions actually had a greater stabilizing effect than did those of the fed as a consequence a potentially severe recession turned out to be only a slowdown and inflation never departed from levels consistent with the ecb s quantitative definition of price stability other factors that account for the different economic outcomes in the euro area and us include differences in shocks and differences in the degree of wage and price flexibility

challenger entry and voter learning we develop a model of strategic interaction between voters and potential electoral challengers to sitting incumbents in which the very fact of a costly challenge conveys relevant information to voters given incumbent failure in office challenger entry is more likely but the threat of entry by inferior challengers creates an incentive for citizens to become more politically informed at the same time challenges to incumbents who perform well can neutralize a voter s positive assessment of incumbent qualifications how a voter becomes politically informed can in turn deter challengers of different levels of competence from running depending on the electoral environment the model permits us to sharpen our understanding of retrospective voting the incumbency advantage and the relationship between electoral competition and voter welfare while pointing to new interpretations of and future avenues for empirical research on elections

inflation risk premia in the term structure of interest rates this paper estimates the size and dynamics of inflation risk premia in the euro area based on a joint model of macroeconomic and term structure dynamics information from both nominal and index linked yields is used in the empirical analysis our results indicate that the inflation risk premium on euro area 10 year nominal yields was approximately equal to 20 basis points on average over the 1999 2007 period the inflation premium has also been subject to moderate but statistically significant fluctuations for the post 2003 period in which reliable index linked bond prices are available our results suggest that increases in the raw break even inflation rate above 2 the upper bound of the european central bank s definition for price stability have mostly reflected variations in the inflation risk premium while long term inflation expectations have remained well anchored

liquidity provision as a monetary policy tool the ecb s non standard measures after the financial crisis abstract we study the macroeconomic consequences of the money market tensions associated with the financial crisis in the euro area in a structural var we identify a liquidity shock rooted in the interbank market and use its impulse response functions to calibrate key parameters of a smets and wouters 2003 closed economy model augmented with a banking sector a la gertler and kiyotaki 2010 we highlight two main results first an identified liquidity shock causes a sizable and persistent fall in investment the shock can account for one third of the observed large fall in euro area aggregate investment in 2008 09 second the liquidity injected in the market by the ecb played an important role in attenuating the macroeconomic impact of the shock according to our counterfactual simulations based on the structural model in the absence of ecb liquidity injections interbank spreads would have been at least 200 basis points higher and their adverse impact on investment would have been more than twice as severe

divided government versus incumbency externality effect quasi experimental evidence on multiple voting decisions abstract this paper explores the causal relationship between vote outcomes in different elections we ask 1 does the partisan identity of the mayor influence the voter s decision in subsequent town council elections 2 do voters condition their vote for the mayor on the result of the last council election the analysis mainprod type flply relies on a regression discontinuity design focusing on close election outcomes based on municipal level data for germany we find that the party of the mayor can receive a significant bonus in the next town council election moreover voters punish mayor candidates of parties that performed strongly in earlier council elections throughout the paper we highlight how these findings can be related to an incumbency externality effect and to the theory of divided government

campaign spending limits incumbent spending and election outcomes abstract we study the impact of campaign spending limits for candidates in canadian federal elections we first demonstrate that spending limits are binding mostly for incumbent candidates we then use this information to produce endogeneity corrected estimates for the impact of incumbent spending on electoral vote shares furthermore we examine the impact of spending limits on broader measures of electoral outcomes finding that larger limits lead to less close elections fewer candidates and lower voter turnout

the effectiveness of non standard monetary policy in addressing liquidity risk during the financial crisis the experiences of the federal reserve and the european central bank abstract a number of studies sought to measure the effects of non standard policy on bank funding markets this paper carries those estimates a step further by looking at the effects of bank funding market stress on the volume of bank lending by separately modeling loan supply and demand we determine how non standard central bank measures affected bank lending by reducing stress in bank funding markets our results suggest that non standard policy measures lowered bank funding volatility in the us and the euro area lower bank funding volatility in turn increased loan supply in both regions contributing to sustained lending activity

the campaign value of incumbency a new solution to the puzzle of less effective incumbent spending a puzzle in research on campaign spending is that while expenditure is positively related to votes won this effect is far more strongly or even exclusively enjoyed by challengers rather than by incumbents we unearth a new explanation for the puzzle focusing on the hidden yet variable campaign value of office perquisites which incumbents deploy in their campaigns to win votes when these variable office benefits are unobserved then the effect is to make observed incumbent spending less effective than spending by challengers using data from the 2002 irish general election where incumbency was assigned a variable campaign value and included in declared campaign spending we are able to demonstrate this hidden incumbency effect and estimate its relationship to electoral success in terms of overall votes share of votes and probability of winning a seat contrary to previous research showing ineffective incumbent spending we find that when the campaign value of office is also measured public office value spending is not only very effective in winning votes but also seems to be more effective than regular incumbent spending

using repeat challengers to estimate the effect of campaign spending on election outcomes in the u s house previous studies of congressional spending have typically found a large positive effect of challenger spending but little evidence for effects of incumbent spending those studies however do not adequately control for inherent differences in vote getting ability across candidates high quality challengers are likely to receive a high fraction of the vote and have high campaign expenditures even if campaign spending has no impact on election outcomes to avoid that bias this paper examines elections in which the same two candidates face one another on more than one occasion differencing eliminates the influence of any fixed candidate or district attributes estimates of the effects of challenger spending are an order of magnitude below those of previous studies campaign spending has an extremely small impact on election outcomes regardless of who does the spending campaign spending limits appear socially desirable but public financing of campaigns does not

optimal gerrymandering sometimes pack but never crack standard intuitions for optimal gerrymandering involve concentrating one s extreme opponents in unwinnable districts packing and spreading one s supporters evenly over winnable districts cracking these intuitions come from models with either no uncertainty about voter preferences or only two voter types in contrast we characterize the solution to a problem in which a gerrymanderer observes a noisy signal of voter preferences from a continu ous distribution and creates n districts of equal size to maximize the expected number of districts she wins under mild regularity conditions we show that cracking is never optimal one s most ardent supporters should be grouped together moreover for sufficiently precise signals the optimal solution involves creating a district that matches extreme republicans with extreme democrats and then continuing to match toward the center of the signal distribution jel d72

voter uncertainty and failure of duverger s law an empirical analysis real world simple plurality elections rarely bear out the strong duvergerian prediction that in equilibrium only two competitors receive votes recent advances in strategic voting theory demonstrate that voter uncertainty about competitors true support levels in the constituency may lead to limited strategic voting and hence incomplete desertion of trailing parties this is the first attempt to estimate empirically the impact of uncertainty on incentives to vote strategically calibrating a model of strategic voting to voting results from simple plurality elections in german constituencies it is found that strategic voters operate under high levels of uncertainty these results support the proposition that uncertainty about party support impedes formation of duvergerian equilibria

the disadvantaged incumbents estimating incumbency effects in indian state legislatures this paper estimates the incumbency effects using a large dataset on state legislative elections in india during 1975 2003 i use a regression discontinuity design rdd that estimates the causal effect of incumbency by comparing candidates in closely fought elections i find that there is a significant disadvantage to incumbency in indian state legislative elections and the adverse effect of incumbency has increased after 1991 also the incumbency disadvantage is higher in states that have lower availability of public goods such as health centers and lower employment poverty and per capita income

candidate uncertainty mental models and complexity some experimental results since the work of downs 1957 spatial models of elections have been a mainstay of research in political science and public choice despite the plethora of theoretical and empirical research involving spatial models researchers have not considered in great detail the complexity of the decision task that a candidate confronts two facets of a candidate s decision process are investigated here using a set of laboratory experiments where subjects face a fixed incumbent in a two dimensional policy space first we analyze the effect that the complexity of the electoral landscape has on the ability of the subject to defeat the incumbent second we analyze the impact that a subject s mental model which we infer from a pre experiment questionnaire has on her performance the experimental results suggest that the complexity of a candidate s decision task and her perception of the task may be important factors in electoral competition

forecast performance of wasde price projections for u s corn we conduct a comprehensive evaluation of the season average price projections for u s corn as published by the u s department of agriculture s world agricultural supply and demand estimates wasde an important issue given reduced resources and increased program scrutiny within the federal government this study is the first in the literature to evaluate the wasde corn projections relative to futures adjusted forecasts throughout the forecasting cycle using a lengthy evaluation period 1980 81 2012 13 we find that wasde projections provide lower rmses relative to futures adjusted forecasts for 9 of the 16 forecast periods 4 of which are statistically different encompassing tests show that wasde projections often provide incremental information not present in the futures adjusted forecasts composite forecasts based on futures adjusted forecasts and wasde projections reduced the rmses over all forecast periods by an average 12 16 favorable average trading profits may be generated for some forecast months using wasde projections overall our results suggest that wasde projections of the u s corn season average price provide useful information to the market and could enhance the efficiency of the agricultural sector

term limitation in a dynamic model of partisan balance in november 1992 voters in fourteen states considered ballot propositions to adopt term limits for members of congress all fourteen propositions passed ten received more than 60 support bringing the total number of states with congressional term limits to fifteen much of the discussion of term limitation has focused on issues of representation the strength of parties and the functioning of congress after the adoption of limits benjamin and malbin 1992 will 1992 this paper explores an important but less discussed consequence of term limitation its impact on the partisan balance of legislatures we inquire how electoral dynamics incumbent advantage and voluntary retirement interact with a term limit to produce a new balance between parties in a two party legislature which party is favored by the introduction of term limits how does the length of the term limit matter are there conditions such that one party will be favored by any limit regardless of how restrictive

election results and opportunistic policies a new test of the rational political business cycle model the literature on the rational pbc suggests that politicians systematically manipulate economic and fiscal conditions before elections to increase their chances of reelection most tests of this theory look for evidence of pre election distortions in fiscal policy we propose a new test that explores the two way interaction between the magnitude of the opportunistic distortion and the margin of victory the test is implemented using a large panel of portuguese municipalities the results show that opportunism leads to a larger win margin for the incumbent and that incumbents behave more opportunistically when their win margin is small these results are consistent with the theoretical model

a reform dilemma in polarized democracies abstract we study the feasibility and efficiency of policy reforms in democracies we develop a simple election model where i reforms are costly for voters and politicians and these costs increase with the extent of policy change and ii politicians differ in their ability to carry out reforms efficiently we identify a so called reform dilemma which manifests itself in two variants from a static perspective low reform ability politicians are elected when political parties are polarized who then impose high costs on citizens for each reform step this property of elections arises as low reform ability is a substitute for policy commitment from a dynamic perspective incumbents may choose socially undesirable policies to align the social need for reform with their own reform ability and are thus re elected regardless of their reform ability

candidate quality the personal vote and the incumbency advantage in congress most political observers agree that incumbent legislators have a considerable advantage over nonincumbents in modern congressional elections yet there is still disagreement over the exact source of this advantage and the explanation for its growth over time to address this debate we utilize a unique set of historical elections data to test for the presence of an incumbency advantage in late nineteenth century house elections 1872 1900 we find a modest direct effect of incumbency and a substantial candidate quality effect moreover the cartel like control of ballot access by nineteenth century political parties created competition in races that the modern market like system simply does not sustain our results suggest that candidate quality is a fundamental piece of the puzzle in understanding the historical development of the incumbency advantage in american politics

the impact of campaign spending on votes in multiparty elections abstract the impact of candidate campaign spending on votes and abstention in multiparty elections is estimated from the specification of a structural model of voter behavior this model accounts for the endogeneity of campaign spending as well as the heterogeneity in voter preferences empirical results are estimated from aggregate actual election data the results demonstrate the importance of spending during the campaign period and voter heterogeneity with respect to these expenditures the own and cross expenditure vote share elasticity estimates reveal that political campaign spending not only redistributes voters across parties but also decreases the size of the abstaining group of the electorate

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

heterogeneous transmission mechanism monetary policy and financial fragility in the eurozone the eurozone economic activity and banking sector have shown substantial fragility over the last years with remarkable country heterogeneity using detailed data on lending conditions and standards we analyse along several key dimensions of heterogeneity how financial fragility has affected the transmission mechanism of the single eurozone monetary policy the analysis shows that the monetary transmission mechanism is time varying and influenced by the financial fragility of the sovereigns banks firms and households the impact of monetary policy on aggregate output is stronger during the financial crisis especially in countries facing increased sovereign financial distress this amplification mechanism moreover operates through the credit channel both the bank lending and the non financial borrower balance sheet channels our results suggest that the bank lending channel has been to a large extent neutralized by the ecb non standard monetary policy interventions but the policy framework until the end of 2011 was insufficient to overcome credit availability problems stemming from deteriorated firm net worth and risk conditions especially for small firms in countries under stress matteo ciccarelli angela maddaloni and jose luis peydro

incumbency electoral safety and turnover in the house of representatives 1952 76 two hypotheses have received a great deal of attention from students of congressional elections first many analysts have concluded that an increase in the electoral value attached to incumbency accounts for the rise in incumbents victory margins observed since the mid sixties second many scholars have attributed the decline in electoral turnover to the percentage increase in victory margins analyzing the electoral histories of 13 house cohorts 1952 76 this study reexamines these two hypotheses within theframework of a quasi experimental design the results presented here in contrast to those of previous studies cast doubt on the increased incumbency effect moreover little relationship is found between an increase in electoral safety as reflected by increased victory margins and a decline in electoral turnover

systematically dependent competing risks and strategic retirement in many applications of survival analysis the risk of an event occurring for one reason is dependent on the risk of the same event occurring for another reason for example when politicians suspect they might lose an election they may strategically choose to retire in such situations the often used multinomial logit model suffers from bias and underestimates the degree of strategic retirement for example to what extent poor prior electoral performance diminishes electoral prospects to address this problem the present article proposes a systematically dependent competing risks sdcr model of survival analysis unlike the frailty model the sdcr model can also deal with more than two risks monte carlo simulation demonstrates how much the sdcr model reduces bias reanalysis of data on u s congressional careers box steffensmeier and jones 2004 documents the strategic retirement of representatives indicating that electoral pressure is more effective at turning out incumbents than previously recognized

credit and liquidity in interbank rates a quadratic approach a bank that lends on the unsecured market requires compensations for facing the default risk of the borrowing bank credit risk and the risk associated to its own future funding needs liquidity risk in this paper we propose a quadratic term structure model of the spreads between unsecured and risk free interbank rates our no arbitrage econometric framework allows us to decompose the term structure of spreads into credit and liquidity components and to identify risk premia associated with each of these two risks our results suggest that over the period 2012 2013 most of the reduction in interbank spreads comes from a decrease in liquidity related risk components

dynamic responsiveness in the u s senate id evelop a theory of dynamic responsiveness that suggests that parties that win elections choose candidates who are more extreme and parties that lose elections choose candidates who are more moderate moreover the size of past victories matters close elections yield little change but landslides yield large rc hanges in the candidates offered by both parties i test this theory by analyzing the relationship between republican vote share in u s senate elections and the ideology of candidates offered in the subsequent election the results show that republican democratic victories in past elections yield candidates wh oa re more less conservative in subsequent elections and the effect is proportional to the margin of victory this suggests that parties or candidates pay attention to past election returns one major implication is that parties may remain polarized in spite of their responsiveness to the median voter

legislative turnover fiscal policy and economic growth evidence from u s state legislatures an examination of how increased turnover among legislators in the fifty u s states affects fiscal policy and economic growth finds that it makes legislators short sighted turnover increases the size of government by increasing the shares of both total spending and taxes in income in particular turnover increases capital expenditure and income taxes both of which may cause long run distortions in the economy further increased turnover by resulting in inefficient fiscal policy reduces long term economic growth

the price of pork the seniority trap in the u s house abstract using data on federal outlays and u s house elections i estimate the effect of the pork barrel on the quality of officeholders taking into account the fact that seniority creates a dynamic linkage across periods after estimating the parameters governing the influence of seniority on federal outlays and the parameters governing the distributions of candidate quality i conduct several policy experiments to uncover the size of the welfare loss created by the seniority system i find that the seniority system negatively impacts the quality of representatives but has little effect on the outcomes of elections furthermore the most commonly proposed solution to the distortion term limits may have a significant negative effect on the quality of sitting representatives instead of a quantity constraint term limits i propose a change in the relative price of seniority by way of a pigouvian tax on seniority such a policy achieves the first best outcome

estimating incumbency advantage without bias in this paper we prove theoretically and demonstrate empirically that all existing measures of incumbency advantage in the congressional elections literature are biased or inconsistent we then provide an unbiased estimator based on a very simple linear regression model we apply this new method to congressional elections since 1900 providing the first evidence of a positive incumbency advantage in the first half of the century incumbency advantage is the most frequently studied factor in the last 15 years of congressional elections research discovery of the increase in incum bency advantage has sparked controversy over its origins historical pattern cur rent magnitude and electoral democratic and policy consequences even the most basic descriptive information about incumbency advantage is flawed be cause every previous measure based on aggregate data in this literature is plagued by selection bias inconsistencies and inefficiencies we prove this result and also propose a new unbiased and statistically efficient measure that is very easy to calculate congressional elections from 1900 to the present fit our theoretical model our empirical reanalyses do not challenge the existing scholarly consen sus that incumbency advantage is much larger than it once was however we do challenge the prevailing belief that incumbency advantage was nonexistent and the evidence that it was negative in house elections during the first half of this century alford and brady 1988 we show instead that the average advantage of incumbency in these elections was about two percentage points in section 1 of this paper we define incumbency advantage and section 2 gives an intuitive sense of the problems identifying it even in ideal electoral sys tems section 3 formally proves that sophomore surge and retirement slump are biased estimates of incumbency advantage and section 4 briefly reveals the flaws

field experiments testing the impact of radio advertisements on electoral competition results from previous studies of campaign spending imply that equal sized grants to both incumbents and challengers are a net benefit to challengers who on average spend less money and derive greater marginal returns from each additional dollar this study provides an experimental test of this proposition cities holding mayoral elections in november 2005 and 2006 were randomly assigned to broadcast nonpartisan radio ads that stated the names of the mayoral candidates reminded listeners about the date of the upcoming election and encouraged them to vote consistent with the findings of previous studies on the differential effects of incumbent and challenger campaign spending on election outcomes we find that these radio ads produced substantially more competitive elections the borderline statistical significance of our results however invites replication of this experiment

have we underestimated the likelihood and severity of zero lower bound events prior to the financial crisis most economists probably did not view the zero lower bound zlb as a major problem for central banks using a range of structural and statistical models we find that previous research understated the zlb threat by ignoring uncertainty about model parameters and latent variables focusing too much on the great moderation experience and relying on structural models whose dynamics cannot generate sustained zlb episodes our analysis also suggests that the federal reserve s asset purchases while materially improving macroeconomic conditions did not prevent the zlb constraint from having first order adverse effects on real activity and inflation

quality counts extending the strategic politician model of incumbent deterrence competitive elections are essential to representative democracy competition in u s house elections is low in part because incumbents have strategic advantages that deter strong potential candidates from running many observers conclude that incumbents retain their seats without full accountability to the electorate but the mechanisms of deterrence have never been fully explored from the perspective of strong potential candidates based on a survey of potential house candidates designed to capture perceptions of incumbents personal quality and reelection prospects we find strong evidence for the strategic politicians thesis black 1972 jacobson and kernell 1983 we extend the logic of the strategic model first by showing that incumbents reelection prospects are affected by their personal quality and second by demonstrating that incumbents personal qualities deter strong challengers from running independent of their electoral prospects our findings prompt us to suggest revisions to our understanding of competition and representation in contemporary house elections

using multimember district elections to estimate the sources of the incumbency advantage in this article we use a novel research design that exploits unique features of multimember districts to estimate and decompose the incumbency advantage in state legislative elections like some existing related studies we also use repeated observations on the same candidates to account for unobserved factors that remain constant across observations multimember districts have the additional feature of copartisans competing for multiple seats within the same district this allows us to identify both the direct office holder benefits and the incumbent quality advantage over nonincumbent candidates from the same party we find that the overall incumbency advantage is of similar magnitude as that found in previous studies we attribute approximately half of this advantage to incumbents quality advantage over open seat candidates and the remainder to direct office holder benefits however we also find some evidence that direct office holder benefits are larger in competitive districts than in safe districts and in states with relatively large legislative budgets per capita