The weak government argument claims that fractionalized governments (coalition or minority governments) have more difficulty increasing their tax revenues or decreasing their spending than majority governments. This implies that weaker governments are associated with higher government deficits....

Empirical research of political business cycles (PBCs) may suffer from endogeneity bias when incumbent governments have discretion to call for an early election. Using an instrumental variable (IV) routine on data from Japan and the U. K., we find strong evidence to support the notion that...

Past analyses of the U.S. Constitutional Convention have relied strictly on votes recorded for the states or a relatively small number of roll calls. We construct a new dataset covering delegate votes on over 600 roll calls. We utilize the data in several ways. First, we use the votes to...

This paper explores the relationship between special-interest groups and volatility of GDP growth. In an unbalanced panel of 108 countries, we find a significant negative relationship between the number of interest groups in a country and the volatility of GDP growth

It is widely recognized that interest groups affect both microeconomic and macroeconomic outcomes. However, few researchers have attempted to empirically discern the factors that contribute to interest group activity. This paper provides a test of several theories of group formation in a panel...

This paper develops a model where rational economic agents face uncertainty regarding the timing of elections and which party will emerge victorious should an election occur. This electoral uncertainty affects the macroeconomy, where the size and direction of the impacts are dependent on the...

This paper presents a model in which voters attempt to balance the ideological positions of their Senate representatives. Candidate positions are determined endogenously through a primary system. The median voter theorem is applied in each election to determine winning platforms based on voter...

The theory of opportunistic political business cycles predicts incumbent politicians will alter their economic policies to spur short-run growth to attract additional votes for the upcoming election. There has not been much emphasis on the possibility of historical political business cycles...

We estimate the influence of defense spending and military labor use on economic growth in African and Latin American countries. Our model integrates disparate implications from the defense economics literature into a Barro-style model of economic growth that controls for political and economic...