Electoral Business Cycles in OECD Countries

Studies of OECD countries have generally failed to detect real economic expansions in the pre-election period, casting doubt on the existence of opportunistic political business cycles. We develop a theory that predicts a substantial portion of the economy experiences a real decline in the pre-election period. Specifically, the political uncertainty created by elections induces private actors to postpone investments with high costs of reversal. The resulting declines, referred to as reverse electoral business cycles, are larger the more competitive the electoral race and the greater the polarization between major parties. We test these predictions using quarterly data on private fixed investment in ten OECD countries between 1975 and 2006. The results suggest that reverse electoral business cycles exist, and as expected, depend on electoral competitiveness and partisan polarization. Moreover, simply by removing private fixed investment from gross domestic product (GDP), we uncover robust evidence of opportunistic cycles.

Supresión oficial de los exámenes en las escuelas públicas (1913).

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Manual para los maestros de escuelas de párvulos.

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Montero Pedrera, Ana María (1996). La enseñanza primaria pública en Sevilla (1857-1900).

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Reverse Electoral Business Cycles and Housing Markets

We argue that the political uncertainty generated by elections encourages private actors to delay investments that entail high costs of reversal, creating a pre-election decline in economic activity entitled a "reverse electoral business cycle." This incentive for delay becomes greater as policy differences between parties/candidates increase. Using new survey and observational data from the United States, we test these arguments. The individual-level analysis assesses whether respondents' perceptions of presidential candidates' policy differences increased the likelihood of postponing certain actions and purchases. For one of these items, housing, we collected observational data to examine whether electoral cycles indeed induce a pre-election decline in economic activity. The findings support the predictions and cannot be explained by existing theories of political business cycles.

Las misiones pedagógicas: Educación y tiempo libre en la Segunda República.

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Following in Her Footsteps? Women's Choices of College Majors and Faculty Gender Composition

It is frequently asserted that a college's female undergraduate enrollment in the sciences and engineering can be increased by raising female representation on the faculties in these areas. Despite the widespread acceptance of this proposition, it does not appear to have been subjected to any kind of serious statistical analysis. In this paper, we assemble panel data from three rather different educational institutions, and use them to examine the relationship between the gender composition of the students in an academic department and the gender composition of its faculty at the time the students were choosing their majors. We find no evidence for the conventional view that an increase in the share of females on a department's faculty leads to an increase in its share of female majors.