The probability of conflicts in a U.S. presidential type election

Summary. In a two candidate election, it might be that a candidate wins in a majority of districts while he gets less vote than his opponent in the whole country. In Social Choice Theory, this situation is known as the compound majority paradox, or the referendum paradox. Although occurrences of such paradoxical results have been observed worldwide in political elections (e.g. United States, United Kingdom, France), no study evaluates theoretically the likelihood of such situations. In this paper, we propose four probability models in order to tackle this issue, for the case where each district has the same population. For a divided electorate, our results prove that the likelihood of this paradox rapidly tends to 20% when the number of districts increases. This probability decreases with the number of states when a candidate receives significatively more vote than his opponent over the whole country.Received: 12 August 2002, Revised: 7 March 2003, JEL Classification Numbers: D71. Correspondence to: Vincent R. MerlinSpecial thanks are due to Franck Bisson, a Caen PhD student, who helped collect the data. The authors also gratefully acknowledge Ashley Piggins and an anonymous referee for their comments.     

Can a corrupt ruling party win a re-election through vote buying?

In many developing countries, it is common for electoral candidates to use embezzled money to buy votes. We develop a dynamic model to analyse the trade-off between economic performance and free handouts resulting from corruption on an incumbent party’s chances of being re-elected. The results show, because voters anticipate handouts from the politicians, politicians engage in corrupt behaviour early in the election cycle while minimizing unemployment and maximizing vote buying at the end of the election cycle.     

Promising politicians,rational voters,and election outcomes

Overwhelming anecdotal evidence suggests that politicians often promise more during an election campaign than they are willing or able to deliver once elected. In this paper, we present two signaling models to explain this phenomenon. In the first model, two candidates maximize their share of the vote. In the second model both try to convince the median voter. In each model, candidates rationally distort their true policy position. Voters, however, are not fooled. Upon observing election promises, they can rationally infer the true position of each candidate. Hence, the election outcome is not affected.JEL Classification: D72, D82The author thanks Peter Kooreman, Wilko Letterie, Bert Schoonbeek, and two anonymous referees for useful comments. Financial support from The Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO) is gratefully acknowledged.     

The 2020 US Presidential election and Trump’s wars on trade and health insurance

The trade war initiated by the Trump administration is the largest since the US imposed the Smoot-Hawley tariffs in the 1930s and was still raging when he left office. We analyze how the trade war impacted the 2020 US Presidential election. Our results highlight the political salience of the trade war: US trade war tariffs boosted Trump’s support but foreign retaliation hurt Trump. In particular, the pro-Trump effects of US trade war tariffs were crucial for Trump crossing the recount thresholds in Georgia and Wisconsin. Even more important politically, voters abandoned Trump in counties with large expansions of health insurance coverage since the Affordable Care Act, presumably fearing the roll-back of such expansion. Absent this anti-Trump effect, Trump would have been on the precipice of re-election by winning Georgia, Arizona, Nevada, and only losing Wisconsin by a few thousand votes. These effects of the trade war and health insurance coverage expansion cross political and racial lines, suggesting the mechanism operates through the impact on local economies rather than political polarization.     

Are college chief executives paid like corporate CEOs or bureaucrats?

We study compensation of college chief executives from 1997 to 2004. Although presidential salaries have acquired the attention of the media, Congress, and the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) in recent years, they are much below those of corporate CEOs. Compared with CEOs in corporations with comparable sizes, college chief executives earn on average approximately one-third of the compensation of their corporate counterparts. However, CEO compensation is more volatile than that of college chief executives. Our results show that private college presidential salaries are consistent with the prediction of job complexity and institutional reputation hypotheses. Presidential compensations of public research universities, on the other hand, are more consistent with the prediction of job complexity hypothesis only. Hence, our findings do not support the prediction of bureaucrat hypothesis for both private and public institutions.     

European commission’s fiscal forecasts in CEE countries: a thorough assessment

ABSTRACT

This paper assesses European Commission’s fiscal forecasts for a sample of 10 Central and Eastern European countries between 2005 and 2015. The analysis focus on forecasts of the budget balance, revenues, expenditures and debt and pays special attention to dynamics around business cycle turning points. Results suggest that the distribution of projection errors appears to be biased towards optimism of fiscal aggregates and accuracy increases as the forecast horizon shortens. We also find evidence of “forecast smoothing”. In addition, we find that, on average, the extent of optimism seems to increase during recessions (and to a lesser extent during recoveries). Moreover, errors in forecasting fiscal variables can be explained by forecasts errors of real GDP growth and inflation.     

The out-of-sample forecasting performance of nonlinear models of regional housing prices in the US

This article provides out-of-sample forecasts of linear and nonlinear models of US and four Census subregions’ housing prices. The forecasts include the traditional point forecasts, but also include interval and density forecasts, of the housing price distributions. The nonlinear smooth-transition autoregressive model outperforms the linear autoregressive model in point forecasts at longer horizons, but the linear autoregressive and nonlinear smooth-transition autoregressive models perform equally at short horizons. In addition, we generally do not find major differences in performance for the interval and density forecasts between the linear and nonlinear models. Finally, in a dynamic 25-step ex-ante and interval forecasting design, we, once again, do not find major differences between the linear and nonlinear models. In sum, we conclude that when forecasting regional housing prices in the United States, generally the additional costs associated with nonlinear forecasts outweigh the benefits for forecasts only a few months into the future.     

Is the Fed’s news perception different from the private sector’s?

The recent literature on monetary policy has dedicated considerable attention to modelling agents’ processing of information about the future in real time. This paper contributes to this growing strand by investigating the implied differences in the so-called news shocks estimated from the standard New Keynesian dynamic stochastic general equilibrium (DSGE) model using the real-time data sets from the Survey of Professional Forecasters (SPF) and the Federal Reserve’s Greenbook (GB) forecasts. Alternative specifications with either the SPF or GB forecasts aim to delineate the differences in the private sector’s and the Fed’s expectations of future macroeconomic outcomes and identify the differences in their perception of news shocks. Our results indicate that while the demand news shocks have very similar distributions in the two datasets, the monetary and cost-push news shocks from the models estimated on the GB data tend to be larger than those from the SPF. These findings suggest that the Federal Reserve’s forecasting methods allow for more variation in future outcomes than the SPF’s. These findings mesh well with the extant literature on the superiority of the Fed’s forecasts relative to the private sector’s and provide a structural explanation for the source of this superiority.     

Evaluating the survey of professional forecasters probability distributions of expected inflation based on derived event probability forecasts

Techniques are proposed for evaluating forecast probabilities of events. The tools are especially useful when, as in the case of the Survey of Professional Forecasters (SPF) expected probability distributions of inflation, recourse cannot be made to the method of construction in the evaluation of the forecasts. The tests of efficiency and conditional efficiency are applied to the forecast probabilities of events of interest derived from the SPF distributions, and supplement a whole-density evaluation of the SPF distributions based on the probability integral transform approach.

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Majority cycles in a multi-dimensional setting

Summary. We consider a set of alternatives (electoral platforms, bills, etc. ...) defined as a Cartesian product of k finite discrete sets. We assume that the preferences of the individuals (voters) are marginally single-peaked and separable. The main result of this paper states that the pairwise majority relation satisfies these two properties but that it might exhibit several cycles. This result is important when related to classical problems of multi-dimensional decisions such as logrolling and vote trading. We relate our result with a continuous version of it (McKelvey, 1976). Received: March 21, 2000; revised version: April 12, 2001     

Coordinated voting in sequential and simultaneous elections: some experimental evidence

This paper studies a situation wherein a set of voters choose between two alternatives in the presence of a payoff externality. Specifically, regardless of her intrinsic preference, a voter’s payoff is maximized should she vote for the alternative that garners a majority of the votes cast. Are votes coordinated on a single alternative? Using laboratory experiments, we examine voting patterns in sequential voting and simultaneous voting elections. Across both election types, we also vary the amount of information that an individual voter has regarding the intrinsic preferences of the other voters. Our main findings are as follows. In the “low” information treatment, sequential voting elections facilitate coordinated voting. However, in the “high” information treatment, voting patterns are not dependent on how the election is structured.     

美国贸易逆差:增长惯性与可持续性

美国的经常项目逆差特别是贸易逆差“历史悠久”,尤其是近年来高速增长,已引起人们广泛的关注。本文作者认为:20世纪90年代以来的美国贸易逆差已很难单从汇率、贸易政策及产品竞争力等单个变量来加以解释。通过运用滞后一年的时间数列相关分析及回归分析,本文得出的结论是:当期美国贸易逆差是前期美国贸易逆差的惯性增长,并且只要美国资本与金融账户的盈余足够冲抵贸易逆差,美国的贸易逆差便具有可持续性。针对近期美国人制造的“人民币升值论”,结合近十年来中美双边贸易现实,说明美国贸易逆差与人民币汇率之间没有必然联系,人民币升值也不可能改善美国的贸易收支状况。