Research-based policy analysis and commentary from leading economists
Gordon Dahl, 01 February 2022
Election results delight or disappoint us, but do they also affect the size of our families? New research examines the partisan impact of the 2016 US presidential election.
Read more about this research and download the free DP:
Dahl, G, Lu, R and Mullins, W. 2021. 'Partisan Fertility and Presidential Elections'. CEPR
Alberto Alesina, Matteo F. Ferroni, Stefanie Stantcheva, 12 November 2021
The proportion of Black Americans living below the poverty line is more than twice that of white Americans. Using large-scale survey and experimental data, this column investigates how Black and white Americans perceive racial inequities, why they believe those inequities persist, and what interventions they would support to correct them. A stark partisan gap emerges: white Democrats and Black respondents tend to attribute racial inequities to the history of slavery and discrimination – and favour redistributive policies – while white Republicans tend to attribute those inequities to individual decisions or insufficient effort and oppose interventions to reduce them.
Thorsten Beck, Orkun Saka, 15 August 2021
Despite the commonly held views of economists on regulatory capture, our profession has been much more hesitant in recognising similar conflicts of interests that may exist in economics research. This column reports on the related discussions and research presented at the second London Political Finance (POLFIN) workshop, including work on the interaction between political power and corporate favouritism, the influence of partisanship on international capital flows, and political polarisation in financial news as well as in corporate boards. It lays out some of the important takeaways and suggests directions for further research that can shed light on the remaining issues.
Elisabeth Kempf, Margarita Tsoutsoura, 21 December 2018
Partisanship in the US is on the rise. With growing disagreement across voters of different political parties on key issues, understanding the potential implications of this trend for the US economy is of first-order importance. This column examines the degree to which partisan ideology affects the decisions of financial analysts. Using a novel dataset that links credit rating analysts to party affiliations from voter registration records, it shows that analysts who are not affiliated with the US president's party are more likely to downward-adjust corporate credit ratings.
Fink, Ménière, Toole, Veugelers, 13 July 2022
