We construct an empirical model of U.S. monetary policy assuming that the Federal Reserve is an ordinary federal bureaucracy. We use the real Federal Funds rate as our policy measure and show the existence of significant executive, legislative, and bureaucratic influence on the real rate of...

We study the effects of growth volatility and inflation volatility on average rates of output growth and inflation for post-war U.S. data. Our results suggest that growth uncertainty is associated with higher average growth and lower average inflation. Inflation uncertainty is significantly...

The authors examine the linkage between federal deficits and money growth by allowing the Fed's resp onse to any given deficit to vary systematically according to how the deficit is generated and the party affiliation of the current presid ent. In equations for M1 and monetary base growth, the...

The effect of macroeconomic fluctuations on House elections is a long debated, but still unresolved, issue. We argue that return rates are theoretically superior to vote shares as measures of electoral accountability and that incumbents, not candidates of the president's party, are the...

We create a rotating bandit model of executive turnover in politics with autocratic presidents, large and centralized governments, and limited reelection. The model is an extension of McGuire and Olson's 1996 work. We apply our model by studying the relationship between electoral cycles and...

There is little professional consensus regarding the effect of economic conditions on House Elections. We argue that recent work still uses the paradigm of Party to organize their data and tests. Given that recent developments in the theory of congress emphasize the paradigm of Incumbency, we...

In this paper, the authors show that current statistical measures of legislator's shirking are implicitly based on the electoral concept of a unique majority rule equilibrium point in the policy space where elections are contested. The authors note that such equilibria do not exist generically...

The effect of changes in policy regimes on real interest rates has important implications for financial and economic theory. There is little current evidence that policy regime changes have any impact on the level of real interest rates. We use large political changes as our measure of policy...