Public officials have blamed Wall Street and its complex financial products for causing the 2008 economic downturn. This article addresses three popular claims saying that complex financial markets are at fault and need more regulation. It argues that even in the midst of a major economic...

Given that Nordhaus' political business cycle theory is relevant at election cycle frequency and that its validity can change over time, we consider wavelet analysis especially suited to test the theory. For the postwar U.S. economy, we exploit wavelet methods to demonstrate whether there...

The paper examines the political business cycle at the municipal level in the Czech Republic using data for 205 municipalities in the period 2001-2007. We introduce empirical models based on fixed-effects panel data regression testing the capital and current expenditure manipulation prior to...

While voters may punish governments for worsening economic conditions, they may not reward them symmetrically for improving conditions. We examine whether US macroeconomic conditions affect Presidential approval asymmetrically using quarterly data from 1961_I to 2009_II. The results suggest that...

We examine state income and government spending data to investigate the role of political parties and elections in state business cycles of the United States, and find strong support for the partisan political business cycles, both traditional and rational versions. The growth rate of per capita...

There is a wide range of theories that try to explain interactions between politics end economy that are referred as political cycles. Majority of these theories aims at analysis of changes in economic outcomes that are related to elections or other phenomena in the political reality. To induce...

Drawing from the personal tape recordings made during the presidency of Richard Nixon, we uncover and report in this paper new evidence that Nixon manipulated Arthur Burns and the Federal Reserve Bank into creating a political business cycle that helped secure Nixon’s reelection victory in...

Filipino politicians are frequently characterized as being driven by office-seeking motives. Despite this, surprisingly little systematic evidence is available to support the electoral-cycle hypothesis in the Philippines. This paper tests the real-world relevance of the longstanding belief in...

This paper studies the stability between the government approval and macroeconomic series for Germany during 1977-2004 allowing structural breaks. We first execute traditional cointegration tests without breaks, and the results reveal weak evidence of a link between the political and economic...