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Working Paper
Did the 2017 Tax Reform Discriminate against Blue State Voters?
The Tax Cut and Jobs Act of 2017 (TCJA) made significant changes to corporate and personal federal income taxation, including limiting the SALT (state and local property, income and sales taxes) deductibility to $10,000. States with high SALT tend to vote Democratic. This paper estimates the differential effect of the TCJA on red- and blue-state taxpayers and investigates the importance of the SALT limitation to this differential. We calculate the effect of permanent implementation of the TCJA on households using The Fiscal Analyzer: a life-cycle, consumption-smoothing program incorporating ...
Working Paper
Persuasion and Dissuasion in Political Campaigns: Political Communication and Media Coverage in Senate Races
We study the strategic interaction between candidates to office and the print media, exploring the following tension: while the media is instrumental for candidates to communicate with voters, candidates and media outlets have conflicting preferences over the contents of media reporting. We propose a model of bipartisan races where candidates make decisions over the type of constituencies to target with their statements along the campaign trail and media outlets make decisions over how intensely to report about the candidates based on those statements. Different kinds of media reports may ...
Working Paper
Endogenous Political Turnover and Fluctuations in Sovereign Default Risk
A sovereign default model in which the sovereign derives private benefits from public office and contests elections to stay in power is developed. The economy?s growth process is modeled as a Markov switching regime, which is shown to be a better description of the data for our set of emerging economies. In the model, consistent with evidence, the sovereign is less likely to be reelected if economic growth is weak. In the low-growth regime, there is higher probability of loss of private benefits due to turnover, which makes the sovereign behave more myopically. This growth-linked variation in ...
Discussion Paper
Economic Expectations Grow Less Polarized since the 2016 Election
In two previous blog posts (from January 2017 and December 2017), we examined political polarization in economic expectations in the period immediately after the 2016 presidential election using the Survey of Consumer Expectations (SCE). Today, we begin a two-part series that revisits the issue. In this post, we provide an update on how economic expectations have evolved in counties where a plurality voted for Donald Trump in 2016 and counties where a plurality voted for Hillary Clinton. In a second post, we will look at how economic expectations differed in the run-up to the 2018 ...
Working Paper
Does Trade Liberalization with China Influence U.S. Elections?
This paper examines the impact of trade liberalization on U.S. Congressional elections. We find that U.S. counties subject to greater competition from China via a change in U.S. trade policy exhibit relative increases in turnout, the share of votes cast for Democrats and the probability that the county is represented by a Democrat. We find that these changes are consistent with Democrats in office being more likely than Republicans to support legislation limiting import competition or favoring economic assistance.