US presidents can influence monetary policy through the appointment process of the Federal Open Market Committee members. This column examines the policy preferences of Committee members in relation to the ideology of their appointers. Democratic Board nominees have been mostly perceived to be doves, while the shares of both hawks and doves (as opposed to swingers) appears higher for Republican nominees. In contrast, a high share of hawks among Federal Reserve Bank presidents, who are appointed by their bank’s board of directors, is observed irrespective of the president’s party.
Politics and economics
In 1997 Germany was called "the sick man of Europe". So what is behind its exceptional recovery? Tim Phillips talks to Dalia Marin, the editor of a recent VoxEU ebook that explains what Germany did, and what other countries can learn from it.
Public procurement outcomes crucially depend on the ability of the procuring agency to select high-performing suppliers. This column uses Italian data to explore how public administrator discretion affects public resource allocation. Greater discretion results in reallocation towards politically connected, low-performing firms. These adverse effects are driven by lower-quality procuring agencies.
Inequality between Europe's regions has risen in the last few decades. Joan Rosés and Nikolaus Wolf discuss their research on inequality at both the personal and regional levels across Europe in the last century. Rising regional inequality is one factor behind the growing populism in Europe.
Growth and employment in the US have been robust over the past 18 months, and President Trump frequently takes personal credit for these trends. This column explores how the US economy would have evolved without Trump. An analysis shows no difference between the post-election performance of the US economy under Trump and a synthetic ‘doppelganger’ US economy without Trump, suggesting that there has been no ‘Trump effect’.
Most Read
Vox eBooks
Casey, Crane, Gensler, Johnson, Narula, 16 July 2018
Vox Talks
Events
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27 - 28 August 2018 / Sala del Sindaco, Palazzo Orsini, Galatina (Lecce) / Banque de France and Paris School of Economics
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2 - 5 September 2018 / Albert Ludwigs University Freiburg / Verein fuer Socialpolitik
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10 - 11 September 2018 / Leipzig University / Leipzig University, European Association of Young Economists
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12 - 13 September 2018 / Rome, Italy / European Center of Sustainable Development , CIT University
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19 - 19 September 2018 / London School of Economics / London School of Economics
