presidents and the economy: a forensic investigation

by MaxEntropy_Man Sat Jan 04, 2014 7:26 pm

http://www.princeton.edu/~mwatson/papers/Presidents_Blinder_Watson_Nov2013.pdf

ABSTRACT
The U.S. economy has performed better when the President of the United States is a
Democrat rather than a Republican, almost regardless of how one measures performance. For
many measures, including real GDP growth (on which we concentrate), the performance gap is
both large and statistically significant, despite the fact that postwar history includes only 16
presidential terms. This paper asks why. We find that the answer is not found in technical time
series matters (such as differential trends or mean reversion), nor in systematically more
expansionary monetary or fiscal policy under Democrats. Rather, it appears that the Democratic
edge stems mainly from more benign oil shocks, superior TFP performance, and more optimistic
consumer expectations about the near-term future. Many other potential explanations are
examined, but they fail to explain the partisan growth gap.

by Rishi Sat Jan 04, 2014 7:56 pm

MaxEntropy_Man wrote:http://www.princeton.edu/~mwatson/papers/Presidents_Blinder_Watson_Nov2013.pdf

ABSTRACT
The U.S. economy has performed better when the President of the United States is a
Democrat rather than a Republican, almost regardless of how one measures performance. For
many measures, including real GDP growth (on which we concentrate), the performance gap is
both large and statistically significant, despite the fact that postwar history includes only 16
presidential terms. This paper asks why. We find that the answer is not found in technical time
series matters (such as differential trends or mean reversion), nor in systematically more
expansionary monetary or fiscal policy under Democrats. Rather, it appears that the Democratic
edge stems mainly from more benign oil shocks, superior TFP performance, and more optimistic
consumer expectations about the near-term future. Many other potential explanations are
examined, but they fail to explain the partisan growth gap.

>>>How did the economy do under Jimmy Carter?

by Rishi Sat Jan 04, 2014 7:59 pm

>>>Btw I just peeked into the pdf.

I expected to find some stuff about regression. There it was.

Looks like that is what Economists do. Do some regressions on whatever data sets they could find.

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