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PDF Ebook Registration and Voting under Rational Expectations: The Econometric Implications

Submitted by antoq on Sat, 03/20/2010 - 02:00

Alone among modern democracies, the United States makes voter registration a personal responsibility rather than a governmental function. In almost all states, registration dead( lines occur well before elections. Failure to register by the deadline makes the probability of voting exactly zero. This sequential feature of the registration and voting decisions has been skipped over by most researchers, who simply ignore registration. Others, notably Timpone (1998), have used the seemingly appropriate Heckmansstyle selection model, but have arrived at findings diffi cult to believe. This paper investigates the appropriate choice of a registration model under a rational expectations assumption about the desire to vote, showing that, rather surprisingly, conventional selection models will generally perform less well than ignoring the selection effect of registration entirely. However, neither is quite correct. Finally then, the paper proposes and tests a flexible model for registration as a step toward substantively appropriate joint modeling of registration and voting.

Voter turnout is central to the theory of democratic government. Without equal par( ticipation, elections lose legitimacy. Many believe that uneven participation also biases government policy (Lijphart 1997, Griffi n & Newman 2005). Thus uneven turnout across the population has concerned political scientists for a long time (Merriam and Gosnell 1924, Arneson 1925, Gosnell 1927, Tingsten 1937), and prominent political scientists continue to study it empirically and to test our theoretical notions against the evidence (e.g., Kelley et al. 1967, Wolfinger & Rosenstone 1980, Verba et al. 1995, Blais 2000).

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PDF Ebook A Model for the Federal Funds Rate Target

Submitted by antoq on Mon, 03/22/2010 - 08:13

This paper is a statistical analysis of the manner in which the Federal Reserve deterM mines the level of the federal funds rate target, one of the most publicized and anticipated economic indicators in the financial world. The paper introduces new statistical tools for forecasting a discreteMvalued time series such as the target, and suggests that these methods, in conjunction with a focus on the institutional details of how the target is determined, can significantly improve on standard VAR forecasts of the effective federal funds rate. We further show that the news that the Fed has changed the target has substantially different statistical content from the news that the Fed failed to make an anticipated target change, causing us to challenge some of the conclusions drawn from standard linear VAR impulseM response functions.

This paper is a statistical analysis of the manner in which the Federal Reserve System (the Fed) determines the level of shortMterm interest rates in the U.S. In particular, we study when and how the Fed decides to change the level of the federal funds rate target, one of the most publicized and anticipated indicators for financial markets all over the world. The target (for short) is an internal objective that is set by the Chairman of the Federal Reserve System in compliance with the directives agreed upon at the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) meetings. The target is used by the Trading Desk of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York as a guide for the daily conduct of open market operations. We believe the target is of considerable economic interest precisely because it is not the outcome of the interaction of supply and demand of federal funds and it is not subject to technical fluctuations or extraneous sources of noise. Rather, it is an operational indicator of how the direction of monetary policy determined by the FOMC is translated into practice.

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Ebook Reorganization of the House of Representatives: Modern Reform Efforts

Submitted by wulan on Mon, 08/03/2009 - 02:59

The House standing committee system began in 1789 with the creation of the Committee on Enrolled Bills. By 1810, the House had 10 standing committees. By the time of the Civil War, thestandingcommittee system was entrenched; the House had 39 standing panels. When Woodrow Wilson wrote his doctoral dissertation in 1885, he characterized Congress as “a government by the chairmen of the Standing Committees of Congress.”

In the years following, many new standing committees were created, although veryfew were abolished. By1913, there were 61 standingcommittees in the House. In 1927, the House combined 11 expenditure committees into one Committee on Expenditures in the Executive Departments.

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