State Public Pension funds have increased their portfolios into riskier alternative investments to meet their annual required contributions (ARC). Our paper uses The Public Plans Data (PPD) to analyze the differences in alternative investments for 2001 to 2013 by Democrats and Republican...

The institutional and organizational details framing legislative processes are key aspects for understanding how Congresses work. From a new institutional economics perspective, this paper comparatively examines how the Spanish and USA Congresses are organized. The main purpose of the paper is...

The aim of this doctoral project is an empirical analysis of questions concerning economics of education, in particular education policy. The first key aspect is the relationship between public opinion and the level of information of the population. As part of this, a first research project...

Scholarly research demonstrates that Regulatory Impact Analysis often falls short of the standards articulated in executive orders and Office of Management and Budget guidance. More often than not, agencies do not appear to use the Regulatory Impact Analysis to inform major decisions. Regulatory...

This paper compares the quality and use of regulatory analysis accompanying economically significant regulations proposed by US executive branch agencies in 2008, 2009, and 2010. We find that the quality of regulatory analysis is generally low, but varies widely. Budget regulations, which define...

Foreign investment in U.S. companies benefits the economy, but poses risks to national security. Critical emerging and foundational technologies are especially attractive to foreign exploitation. Given the unique opportunities and challenges posed by emerging technologies, the National...

In this paper we study the link between elections, fiscal policy and aggregate fluctuations. The set-up is a stylized dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model incorporating both technology and political re-election shocks. The later are incorporated via a two-party model with elections. The...

Political economists interested in discerning the effects of election outcomes on the economy have been hampered by the problem that economic outcomes also influence elections. We sidestep these problems by analyzing movements in economic indicators caused by clearly exogenous changes in...

Previous studies found that Islamic stock market index in Malaysia (KLSI), does not react, or react negatively to interest rate, although one of the main criteria of Islamic finance is to avoid business and activities that yield interest because of its prohibition in Islamic laws. On the other...