Presidential party affiliation and electoral cycles in the U.S. economy: Evidence from party changes in adjacent terms

Joe Stone and David Jacobs

Journal of Macroeconomics, 2020, vol. 64, issue C

Abstract: Unique evidence presented in this study challenges previous findings about presidential politics and business cycles. Prior studies find strong evidence for a Democratic economic growth advantage of about 1.8% per year over the course of a term but only weak evidence for a pre- election surge in growth for incumbent Presidents of either party. This study finds a much smaller Democratic advantage and strong evidence for a pre-election growth surge for Republican Presidents relative to Democratic Presidents. The novelty of these results is attributable to the use of repeated party-change reversals in adjacent terms for identification in place of binary changes in isolated terms separated by as much as a half-century in prior studies. We find a strongly partisan Federal Reserve effect on growth as well. Results are insensitive to an extensive battery of robustness checks.

Date: 2020
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S016407041930504X
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
Working Paper: Presidential party affiliation and electoral cycles in the U.S.economy: evidence from party changes in adjacent terms (2019)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:jmacro:v:64:y:2020:i:c:s016407041930504x

DOI: 10.1016/j.jmacro.2020.103200

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of Macroeconomics is currently edited by Douglas McMillin and Theodore Palivos

More articles in Journal of Macroeconomics from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().