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It is found that electorally induced policy uncertainty decreases manufacturing investment in US states. In a state with average partisan polarization, the elasticity of election-year investment to a specific measure of policy uncertainty is −0.027. When the incumbent governor is term limited, there is greater uncertainty over the outcome, providing an instrument to demonstrate this effect is causal, not simply coincidental. Moreover, manufacturing investment does not rebound following the election. Rather, own-state uncertainty is associated with a large and significant coincident rise in neighboring states’ investment. These findings suggest that policy uncertainty at the subnational level drives investment to alternate sites.

Theories of partisan redistricting postulate unitary actors maximizing their party’s expected seat share. Yet, the partition of a fixed supply of friendly voters necessarily implies a tragedy of the commons. We recast partisan redistricting as a bargaining game among the sitting representatives of the party controlling the map. The status quo is the threat point, explaining why changes are frequently minor. This bargaining framework implies that highly competitive districts will receive more help from redistricting if they are already represented by the party in charge. Employing a regression discontinuity design with precinct-level data, we find support for this prediction.

Recent literature suggests that electoral budget cycles are a phenomenon of new rather than established democracies. What part of the democratization process explains the amelioration of the political budget cycle? We argue the answer lies (in part) in the development of a strong party system. We extend the classic Rogoff-Siebert model to show that political budget cycles are possible in a legislative context with rational voters. We then demonstrate that the development of a strong party system can restrain political budget cycles in a majoritarian electoral system. Finally, we follow prior work in using vote share volatility as a measure of the institutionalization of the party system. Using newly collected vote-share data for 433 elections for 90 democracies from 1980-2007, we calculate a measure of party institutionalization. We then use this data to demonstrate that institutionalized party systems are associated with mitigated political budget cycles, especially in majoritarian electoral systems.

We examine legislative activity to determine when Congress threatens the Fed and whether this pressure affects monetary policy. By the late-1980s Congress shifted from threatening when unemployment was high to threatening when inflation was high. We use the Romer and Romer monetary shocks to isolate changes in the federal funds rate that cannot be explained by economic conditions and ask whether these shocks respond to pressure. In the 1970s, the Fed responded to bills credibly threatening Fed powers by lowering the federal funds target below that prescribed by current and forecast economic conditions. However, this accommodation ceased in the mid-1980s.

This event study uses economic forecasts and opinion polls to measure the response of expectations to election surprise. Use of forecast data complements older work on partisan cycles by allowing a tighter link between election and response thereby mitigating concerns of endogeneity and omitted variables. I find that forecasters respond swiftly and significantly to election surprise. I further argue that the response ought to vary across countries with different institutional foundations. In support, I find that there exist three distinct patterns in forecasters' responses to partisan surprise corresponding to Hall and Soskice's three varieties of capitalism.

Block polymers (BPs) have attracted significant attention for emerging nanotechnologies such as nanolithographic masks, nanotemplates, nanoporous membranes, organic photovolatics, and lithium ion battery membranes due to their ability to self-assembly into periodic assemblies of nanoscale features. Many of these applications require thin film geometries, which have additional confinement interactions in comparison to bulk self-assembly that must be understood to control nanostructure orientation, ordering, and alignment precisely. Two approaches to study the nuanced effects of these additional interactions are in situ characterization and neutron scattering, used concurrently or independently. With these techniques, more predictive and optimized methods to direct self-assembly can be established to unlock the full potential of BP thin films in commercial and research applications. In this dissertation work, four aspects of BP thin film self-assembly were explored with these powerful characterization tools. First, chlorosilane-modified substrate surfaces were employed to investigate the effect of the substrate-polymer interaction on nanostructure orientation and ordering. Predictive formalisms were developed that defined substrate wetting behavior, nanostructure ordering, and through-film orientation control as a function of total and decoupled (dispersive and polar) substrate-polymer interfacial energy components. Second, solvent vapor annealing was studied with in situ small-angle neutron scattering (SANS), neutron reflectometry (NR), and selective deuteration to determine how factors such as solvent-polymer interactions and solvent concentration affected BP thin film self-assembly. Next, in situ SANS during solvent vapor annealing with soft shear (SVA-SS) was used to track shear-induced nanostructure disordering and ordering. By understanding the kinetic pathways during SVA-SS, more robust and high-throughput methods to define the alignment direction(s) were developed. Lastly, lithium salt-doped poly(styrene-b-oligo[oxyethylene] methacrylate) films were investigated with NR to achieve the first high-resolution, non-destructive, and quantitative analysis regarding how lithium salts distribute within the conducting domain of BP electrolyte thin films. Overall, the work in this dissertation contributes predictive and translatable approaches to direct self-assembly and the design of powerful characterization strategies to extract key information from BP thin film systems to improve their rational design and application.

The incomplete nature of legislation bestows on the executive branch the residual rights of control over implementation of public policy. The Trump Tax Bill of December 2017, which gave U.S. state governors a one-time opportunity to distribute a geographically-targeted federal tax incentive, provides a useful case-study to untangle the determinants of accountability. All 50 Governors were given the opportunity to designate census tracts within their state for preferential tax treatment. Within 120 days of passage, governors selected up to 25% of their eligible tracts, a short window that allows confident measurement of the political situation when the favor was distributed. We model a governors’ designation of tracts to maximize competing goals of mobilizing their voters, persuading swing voters, rewarding co-partisan legislators, and pursuing the programmatic goal of alleviating poverty. We then estimate the likelihood that an eligible tract is selected as a function of both the economic characteristics of the tract and the political characteristics of the governor and the relevant state and federal legislators. Our results suggest that the executive accountability engendered by eligibility for reelection is weakened by the dual constituency hypothesis, especially in cases where programmatic intent conflicts with the governor’s political motives.

In \"In Search of the Missing Resource Curse,\" Lederman and Maloney critically tackle the problem of whether the natural resource curse exists. The idea that countries rich in natural resources are \"doomed\" by the existence of their lucky endowment has been in the minds of economists for more than 200 years. Perhaps the most important empirical findings supporting the natural resource curse are the seminal contributions by Jeffrey Sachs and Andrew Warner, who consistently find that countries rich in natural resources tend to grow more slowly than their unendowed counterparts. Many have questioned this view, although the two most prominent critics have been Lederman and Maloney. In this paper, they argue that the channels through which the natural resource curse is most commonly thought to operate are not empirically relevant and most of them are theoretically questionable. The paper builds on earlier work to illustrate that the existing stylized fact of a curse is inconclusive at best. The authors use a better measure for resource intensity than what previous researchers have used and find no evidence of a curse. This is a thought-provoking and carefully crafted paper that convincingly argues against one of the strongest views supported by the conventional wisdom.

We estimate the effect of electorally induced policy uncertainty on investment in the manufacturing sector. Because state governors exercise considerable influence over legislation and considerable discretion over regulation and permitting, and because the policies relevant to business investment vary systematically by party, uncertainty over the partisan affiliation of the future governor is a source of political risk to firms considering business investment. More importantly, the lack of an incumbent in a race due to term limits raises uncertainty over the outcome, providing a convincing instrument that allows us to estimate causal effects. We find that, in a state with average partisan polarization, in the calendar year of a gubernatorial election, the elasticity of investment to the eventual margin of victory is 0.027. Both the significance and magnitude of this result are robust to various controls, measures, and estimators. Importantly, the investment decline is not reversed the following year. We show that own-state uncertainty is associated with a large and significant rise in neighboring states' investment, suggesting that rather than postponing investment to the future, the effect of policy uncertainty at the subnational level is to drive investment to alternative sites.

These three chapters represent distinct contributions to the political economy of fiscal and monetary policy. In each case, the contribution is a novel reduced-form test with the power to distinguish between competing theories where such distinction has, in the past, been difficult, delivering a variety of interesting empirical results. Previous tests of the rational partisan theory of political business cycles have remarkably little power to distinguish between it and predecessors based on naïve expectations. Looking at the direct response of expectations to election surprise, I establish that the resolution of uncertainty over future aggregate demand policy that takes place on Election Day can result in large movements in the forecasts of large corporations. I discover a great deal of country-level heterogeneity. I show that some political systems are more susceptible to politically induced economic volatility than others and corporatist economies, where firms tend to coordinate activities via non-market mechanisms, tend to be less responsive to changes in aggregate demand policy than market economies. I use government expenditure data on individual categories and various levels of government to test theories of government size. I estimate a complete specification so as to avoid omitted variables bias. Looking at a detailed pattern of correlations allows me to test implications of the theories beyond those effects they were hypothesized to explain and delivers interesting new results: a partial repudiation of Rodrik's theory of the role of openness, support for a version of Meltzer and Richard which is extended to include the extent of political rights, an explanation of the puzzling Wagner's Law, and more. Redistributive fiscal policy is used both to promote social goals and to buy the votes of various electoral demographics. But the relative magnitudes of these activities is unknown because separately identifying these effects is difficult. Using Bartels' concept of voting power, I test Dixit and Londregan's model of vote-buying with ideologically motivated parties. The vast majority of a household's net redistribution is explained by its income rather than its voting power. Vote-buying is likely minimized because candidates cannot commit to redistributive policy, thus voters view campaign promises as cheap talk.