The notable rebound of U.S. manufacturing activity following the Great Recession has raised the question of whether the sector might be experiencing a renaissance. Using panel regressions, we find that a depreciating real exchange rate, an increasing spread in natural gas prices between the...

We show that average excess returns during the last two years of the presidential cycle are significantly higher than during the first two years: 9.8 percent over the period 1948 2008. This pattern in returns cannot be explained by business-cycle variables capturing time-varying risk premia,...

This paper tests the policitcal dimensions of the presidential cycle effect in U.S. financial markets. The presidential cycle effect states that average stock market returns are significantly higher in the last two years compared to the first two years of a presidential term. We confirm the...

Over the past two decades, private equity has contributed to a shrinking of the U.S. stock market. We develop a political economy model of private equity activity to study the wider economic consequences of this trend. We show that private and social incentives to delist firms from the stock...

We analyze housing taxation from a political economy perspective. Our aim is to understand why the US tax system favors owner housing with respect to business capital despite the efficiency losses involved. The starting point of our analysis is the observation that housing wealth is much more...

This paper presents an empirical examination of economic and institutional development. Utilizing a novel data set on American Indian tribal nations, we investigate how constitutional design affects economic development, while holding the broader legal and political environment fixed....

We assess the effects of U.S. tax policy reforms on inequality by applying a new decomposition method allowing us to disentangle the policy effect from changing market incomes. Over the period 1979-2007, the cumulative policy effect aggravated inequality by increasing the income share of the top...

Over the past two decades, private equity has contributed to a shrinking of the U.S. stock market. We develop a political economy model of private equity activity to study the wider economic consequences of this trend. We show that private and social incentives to delist firms from the stock...

This paper reviews the political economy of extractive resources and the associated resources sector governance agenda. The consensus that good sector governance improves the developmental impacts of extractive resources exploitation is premised on the understanding that institutions matter for...

In this paper we address the issue of the role of ideology and political preferences of publically engaged economists and contribute to the debate on consensus in economics. To do so, we conduct a social network analysis on the signatories of economist petitions, which we identify as one channel...