Government popularity and the economy: first evidence from German microdata

This is one of the first studies to estimate a popularity function at the microlevel. Using German microlevel data for the years 1991, 1992, 1998, and 2008, we show that a positive assessment of the economy significantly improves government popularity, while negative evaluations decrease satisfaction with the government. Voters take the (current and expected) national and personal economic situation into account. We find no evidence for a grievance asymmetry, i.e., voters not only punish the government for a bad economy but also reward them in good times. Finally, we show that popularity functions are only very crude proxies for vote functions, with the latter being mostly driven by party identification.     

A causal relationship between government spending and economic development: an empirical examination of the Greek economy

During the past few years, in many countries, both developed and developing, there has been a tendency to increase government spending. This article intends to examine this tendency of the public sector as well as the existing relationship between the extent of government spending and economic development. The data used cover a time period between 1960 and 2001. An effort is made to determine causal relationships between spending and economic development through the use of Wagner's theory.     

Wagner's hypothesis: evidence from Kuwait using cointegration tests

This paper investigates the relationship between public expenditure and a number of socioeconomic variables, including the level of income, in Kuwait. A general form of the public expenditure function is formulated and recent developments in time series econometrics, including unit roots and cointegration tests, and an error-correction model are used. Given the characteristics of the economy, alternative measures for each variables are used. The analysis in the paper is based on time-series data covering the period from 1969/70 to 1994/95. In general, the findings lend little support to the existence of long-run equilibrium relationship between public expenditure and the socioeconomic variables, and the evidence does not lend support to the validity of Wagner's law in Kuwait.     

Aggregate health care expenditure in the United States: evidence from cointegration tests

Unlike recent studies that are based on international cross-sectional series, this paper attempts to quantify the role of the determinants of aggregate health care expenditure per capita, using time-series data for the period of 1960–87 for the United States. The paper applies the relatively new procedures of unit root testing, cointegration and error-correction modelling. The evidence supports cointegration. Although, the results indicate that per capita income, age of the population, number of practising physicians, and public financing of health care are important determinants, the age structure of the population and number of practising physicians emerge as the major determinants of aggregate health care expenditure in the United States.     

Nonlinear adjustment in PPP—evidence from threshold cointegration

Nonlinearity in PPP has been carefully reported in number of studies. However, asymmetry with respect to the sign of the deviation and the dependency of the asymmetry on the exchange rate regime has largely remained outside the scope of those studies. The present paper partly fills this gap. It applies threshold cointegration techniques to real exchange rate dynamics between two Nordic countries, Finland and Sweden. First, it examines whether the sign of the deviation from equilibrium has any impact on adjustment. Second, it estimates an asymmetric band-type threshold cointegration in PPP. The results supported asymmetric adjustment in PPP. The single, asymmetric threshold indicated stronger adjustment during the flexible exchange rate regime. The band-type asymmetric threshold cointegration suggested that adjustment towards PPP would be fastest within the estimated band, which was interpreted as evidence for the target zone exchange rate regime. Accordingly, the inference on adjustment is sensitive to the type of nonlinearity used.I am grateful to the editor and two anonymous referees for many helpful comments and suggestions.     

Government spending and the exchange rate

This paper investigates the effects of govenment spending on real and nominal exchange rates within the context of an open economy equilibrium rational expectations model. The model predicts that both real and nominal exchange rates appreciate in response to anticipated and unanticipated increases in government spending. Empirical evidence from Germany for the period 1975:2–1989:4 provides some weak support for the predictions of the model.     

Persistent misalignments of the European exchange rates: some evidence from non-linear cointegration

The asymmetric and persistent adjustment of the European real exchange rates is investigated using the framework of non-linear cointegration. The episodes of slow mean-reversion dynamics over the period from 1979 to 1999 are explained. A test of unit root against STAR cointegration is proposed and some complete estimations and stochastic simulations of ESTAR models are presented. The presence of effective non-linear adjustment during the moving of the currencies to their long-run fundamental equilibrium exchange rate value is discussed.     

Dynamics of Government revenues and expenditures in industrial economies

The sources of growth in government revenues and expenditures in 22 OECD countries is addressed. The question of whether the revenue constraint is binding on the growth of government expenditures, or whether the ‘displacement’ effect of expenditure growth is binding is considered. Controls for the effects of the output gap and inflation rate on government revenues and expenditures in each of the 22 countries are presented. A major conclusion is that reductions in spending are essential to reducing budget deficits and controlling government size.     

Government spending and economic growth: the G-7 experience

Using ordered probit estimation technique this paper examines the job satisfaction of recent UK graduates. Focussing primarily on explaining job satisfaction in terms of individuals matching to jobs, with the match depending on reservation returns, information sets and job offer rates. Only limited support can be found for the argument that job matching explains higher job satisfaction. In addition, stylizing graduates as a peer group, who form satisfaction levels based on their rankings relative to each other we examine whether or not education quality, which raises peer group status and increases the job offer rate, is systematically related to job satisfaction. The results broadly support the hypothesis that job satisfaction is neutral across graduates of different education qualities. However, our specification tests indicate that ordered probit estimation may not be fully appropriate for identifying the characteristics of those with high job satisfaction.     

Government spending multipliers in contraction and expansion

This paper investigates the impact of government spending on output and the size of the spending multiplier during periods of output contraction and expansion. It also investigates the impact of spending when the economy hits the nominal zero lower bound. It uses a panel of 21 advanced countries over the period of 1979–2011, applying a TSLS estimation technique. We find a spending multiplier of close to 1 during expansion and values of up to 3 during contractions. However, our results do not indicate a difference in the impact of spending during nominal zero lower bound periods.     

Network externalities in consumer spending on lottery games: evidence from Spain

We use data from two nationally representative Spanish surveys in 2005 and 2006 to investigate spending on lottery games. Estimates from Tobit and double hurdle models of participation in lottery markets and spending on lottery tickets find that frequent participation in one game is not associated with an increased or decreased probability of participating in other games, but is associated with increased spending on other games. Consumer spending on different lottery games exhibits inter-related consumption decisions. Also, the assumptions underlying the double hurdle model, but not the Tobit model, better describe consumer spending on lottery tickets in Spain.     

Exports, imports, and economic growth in Portugal: evidence from causality and cointegration analysis

This paper investigates the Granger-causality between exports, imports, and economic growth in Portugal over the period 1865–1998. The role of the import variable in the investigation of exports–output causality is emphasized, enabling one to test for the cases direct causality, indirect causality, and spurious causality between export growth and output growth. The empirical results do not confirm a unidirectional causality between the variables considered. There is a feedback effect between exports–output growth and imports–output growth. More interestingly, there is no kind of significant causality between import–export growth. Both results seem to support the conclusion that the growth of output for the Portuguese economy during that period revealed a shape associated with a small dual economy in which the intra-industry transactions were very limited.     

Government spending under non-separability: a theoretical analysis

We derive analytic implicit form conditions for the qualitative analysis of government spending multipliers and the optimal level of government spending in presence of non-separability between private and public components of aggregate demand. Using the simplest neo-classical flexible price model with no capital accumulation, we show that Edgeworth dependence is not a suitable condition to automatically assess the signs of the consumption and output multipliers, for which a more complex analysis must be carried out. We propose a detailed investigation of the form and the characteristics of the involved utility functions, which are crucial to such evaluation. We also show that if Edgeworth complementarity is strong enough, a public spending stimulus can raise at the same time private consumption and real activity. In order to reconcile our general framework with existing literature, we discuss recent examples of non-separable functional forms from the standpoint of our results, and argue that their consistency relies on specific assumptions about steady-state points.     

新疆人口迁移与经济增长的协整分析

人口迁移带来的大量劳动力有利于解决新疆劳动力有效供给不足的问题,促进新疆经济的发展。选取新疆1990—2007年的数据,用单位根检验、协整检验以及granger因果检验等统计方法,研究了新疆人口迁移和经济增长二者之间的关系,并根据研究结果提出相应的对策建议。     

Electoral manipulation via voter-friendly spending: Theory and evidence

We present a model of the political budget cycle in which incumbents try to influence voters by changing the composition of government spending, rather than overall spending or revenues. Rational voters may support an incumbent who targets them with spending before the election even though such spending may be due to opportunistic manipulation, because it may also reflect sincere preference of the incumbent for types of spending voters favor. Classifying expenditures into those which are likely targeted to voters and those that are not, we provide evidence supporting our model in data on local public finances for all Colombian municipalities. Our findings indicate both a pre-electoral increase in targeted expenditures, combined with a contraction of other types of expenditure, and a voter response to targeting.     

Revisiting residential demand for electricity in Greece: new evidence from the ARDL approach to cointegration analysis

This article re-examines the long-run and short-run determinants of the aggregate residential demand for electricity in Greece using data spanning the period 1964–2006 and the recently advanced ARDL cointegrating method (Pesaran, J Appl Econ 16:289–326, 2001) that has not been hitherto applied to Greek data. The results of the ARDL method combined with the (Johansen, J Econ Dyn Control 12:231–254, 1988) cointegration method show the presence of an equilibrium relationship among the variables involved. These findings may shed new light on the contemplation of more effective energy policies with respect to electricity.     

Testing for threshold cointegration and error correction: evidence in the petroleum futures market

This article examines the existence of threshold cointegration between futures and spot prices for the Brent petroleum market. We then estimate the asymmetric error-correction specification utilizing the Momentum Threshold Autoregressive Consistent (M-TAR-C) approach particularly proposed by Enders and Siklos (2001 Enders, W and Siklos, PL. 2001. Cointegration and threshold adjustment. Journal of Business and Economic Statistics, 19: 166–76. [Taylor & Francis Online], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]). We find that, for the daily data over 2 January 2001 through 15 October 2006, the petroleum futures prices are cointegrated with the spot prices. This effectively confirms the expectations hypothesis and that asymmetric adjustments for the futures basis towards the long-run value display a negative basis from the long-run equilibrium level more persistently than a positive basis from that level. The empirical result suggests that short-run arbitrages manipulating buy-long (sell-short) futures contracts be profitable when a positive basis is weakening (a negative basis is strengthening).