This paper argues that Blomberg and Hess's (Journal of International Economics 1997) finding that political variables can be used to predict exchange rate movements better than the random walk model must be seen in the context of the decade and half of previous research which failed to beat this...

This is a survey of the literature linking economics and politics. In the introduction, I explain why it is necessary to study these issues as a separate course in economics. I then proceed to analyze voting models, the political business cycle, international and foreign policy issues. The...

This paper investigates the implications of how states with initiative systems of legislation can use this more direct form of democracy to improve productive resource allocation by their goverments. We construct a simple growth model whereby we can identify this channel through which...

The prupose of this paper is to investigate whether legislators vote in two distinct blocs as suggested by the US political system and whether these voting patterns can be explained by economic variables. The paper employs a variant of the Hamilton Reime-Switching Model (1989) to uncover three...

Our purpose in this paper is to address the impact of abortion legalization in the United States on women's fertility behavior. First, we present a model indicating it is quite possible that the effects of abortion legalization are different than an extrapolation of the effects of relatively...

This paper explores several characteristics of patents in the biotechnology field, comparing and contrasting them to patents in other fields of research. We find that biotechnology patents face a longer lag between application and grant date, and their secrecy would be heavily affected if...

In this paper, we examine the effect of refulations, resource and referral agencies, and subsidies on the child\staff ratio at child care centers.

A theory is developed which predicts that people with relatively extreme opinions are relativly rigid in that they are less inclined to modify their opinions. That extremists tend to be rigid and moderates tend to be flexible is found to hold for members of Congress.