Money, politics and the post-war business cycle

• 成果类型: Article
• 署名作者: Faust, J; Irons, JS
• 署名单位: Federal Reserve System - USA; Federal Reserve System Board of Governors; Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)
• 刊物名称: JOURNAL OF MONETARY ECONOMICS
• ISSN/ISSBN: 0304-3932
• DOI: 10.1016/S0304-3932(98)00046-4
• 发表日期: 1999
• 页码: 61-89
• 关键词: political business cycle; monetary policy

摘要

The political economy literature has enshrined as stylized fact the view that lower inflation and temporarily lower growth follow the election of Republican presidents and has emphasized political manipulation of monetary policy as an explanation. Support for the monetary explanation comes in econometric work that largely ignores identification issues that dominate the literature on measuring the effects of monetary policy. We generalize a standard vector autoregression framework to accommodate discrete, political party variables. We find almost no support for the view that political effects on the macroeconomy operate through monetary policy and only weak evidence that political effects are significant at all. (C) 1999 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved. JEL classification. E30; E52.