Elections, Uncertainty and Irreversible Investment

2012 ◽  
Vol 44 (1) ◽  
pp. 83-106 ◽  
Author(s):  
Brandice Canes-Wrone ◽  
Jee-Kwang Park

This article argues that the policy uncertainty generated by elections encourages private actors to delay investments that entail high costs of reversal, creating pre-election declines in the associated sectors. Moreover, this incentive depends on the competitiveness of the race and the policy differences between the major parties/candidates. These arguments are tested using new survey and housing market data from the United States. The survey analysis assesses whether respondents’ perceptions of presidential candidates’ policy differences increased the likelihood that they would delay certain purchases and actions. The housing market analysis examines whether elections are associated with a pre-election decline in economic activity, and whether any such decline depends on electoral competitiveness. The results support the predictions and cannot be explained by existing theories.

Policy Papers ◽  
2013 ◽  
Vol 2013 (60) ◽  
Author(s):  

High uncertainty in general, and high policy uncertainty more specifically, can have important impact on global investment and output growth. Much of the recent policy uncertainty emanated from the United States and Europe—the world’s two largest economies. Spillovers from policy uncertainty can occur through several channels. Trade can be affected if increased policy uncertainty adversely affects economic activity and import demand in the United States and Europe. Policy uncertainty could also raise global risk aversion, resulting in sharp corrections in financial markets and capital outflows from emerging markets. This background note attempts to quantify the impact of U.S. and European policy uncertainty on other regions. Specifically, it addresses the following questions: What do we mean by policy uncertainty? How well can we measure it? How has policy uncertainty in the United States and Europe evolved during the past several decades? And how large are the spillovers to economic activity in other regions? The analysis suggests that sharp increases in U.S. and European policy uncertainty in the past have temporarily lowered investment and output in other regions to varying degrees. It also suggests that a marked decrease in policy uncertainty in the United States and Europe in the near term could help boost global investment and output.


2017 ◽  
Vol 107 (9) ◽  
pp. 2731-2783 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kyle Handley ◽  
Nuno Limão

We examine the impact of policy uncertainty on trade, prices, and real income through firm entry investments in general equilibrium. We estimate and quantify the impact of trade policy on China's export boom to the United States following its 2001 WTO accession. We find the accession reduced the US threat of a trade war, which can account for over one-third of that export growth in the period 2000– 2005. Reduced policy uncertainty lowered US prices and increased its consumers' income by the equivalent of a 13-percentage-point permanent tariff decrease. These findings provide evidence of large effects of policy uncertainty on economic activity and the importance of agreements for reducing it. (JEL D72, F13, F14, O19, P33)


2021 ◽  
pp. 003232172110205
Author(s):  
Giulia Mariani ◽  
Tània Verge

Building on historical and discursive institutionalism, this article examines the agent-based dynamics of gradual institutional change. Specifically, using marriage equality in the United States as a case study, we examine how actors’ ideational work enabled them to make use of the political and discursive opportunities afforded by multiple venues to legitimize the process of institutional change to take off sequentially through layering, displacement, and conversion. We also pay special attention to how the discursive strategies deployed by LGBT advocates, religious-conservative organizations and other private actors created new opportunities to influence policy debates and tip the scales to their preferred policy outcome. The sequential perspective adopted in this study allows problematizing traditional conceptualizations of which actors support or contest the status quo, as enduring oppositional dynamics lead them to perform both roles in subsequent phases of the institutional change process.


Author(s):  
Francesco Giumelli ◽  
Michal Onderco

Abstract While the current practice of the United Nations Security Council, the European Union, and the United States leans towards imposing only targeted sanctions in most of the cases, private actors often complain about inability to process financial transactions, ship goods, or deliver services in countries where sanctions targets are located. The impact of sanctions often ends up being widespread and indiscriminate because sanctions are implemented by for-profit actors. This article investigates how for-profit actors relate to the imposition of sanctions, how they reflect them in their decisions, and how they interact with the public authorities. The findings of our research show that for-profit actors, with the possible exception of the largest multinationals, do not engage with public authorities before the imposition of sanctions. The behaviour of for-profit actors in the implementation phase is in line with the assumption of firms and business as profit-maximisers. Weighting the profits from business against the costs of (non-)compliance and make the decisions that in their view maximise their profit. Indeed, de-risking seems to be the most common approach by the companies due to the uncertainties produced by the multiple and overlapping sanctions regimes imposed by the United Nations, the European Union, and the United States.


Author(s):  
Larisa Yur'evna Dobrynina ◽  
Anna Viktorovna Gubareva

The authors examine the economic sanctions introduced nu the U.S., EU and their allies against the Russian Federation, as well as the legal mechanism of retaliatory measures taken by Russia on the nationwide scale. The changes in the international legal regulation derailed the vector of global development, which was bringing real freedom of economic activity. Establishment of the sanction regime by the aforementioned parties signifies a struggle for own influence, weakening of the positive trade and economic ties, as well as an attempt to institute a regime of protectionism within the international trade turnover exclusively for their own benefit. Based on the analysis of the normative-legal documents, an assessment is made on the legal legitimacy of the introduced discriminatory measures of the allies from the perspective of the norms of international law. This article presents the analysis of the positions of federal laws and other legislative bills of the Russian Federation, establishing gradual constraining countermeasures for foreign subjects in various spheres of activity. The authors substantiate the fact that introduction of retaliatory economic sanctions by the Russian Federation with regards to the United States, European Union, and their allies is directly related to the implementation of the principle of reciprocity, currently existing within private international law. It is noted that all these actions on protection from illegitimate sanctions are realized by Russia practically without participation of UN, WTO and other reputable international organizations in regulation of the “sanctions” issue. The extraterritorial measures introduced by the United States and the European Union justifies the movement of Russian into a new stage of evolution of legal regulation of the foreign economic activity, and in foreign trade – establishment of new markets in Asia, Africa and Latin America.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ibrahim Abaker Targio Hashem ◽  
Raja Sher Afgun Usmani ◽  
Asad Ali Shah ◽  
Abdulwahab Ali Almazroi ◽  
Muhammad Bilal

The COVID-19 pandemic has emerged as the world's most serious health crisis, affecting millions of people all over the world. The majority of nations have imposed nationwide curfews and reduced economic activity to combat the spread of this infectious disease. Governments are monitoring the situation and making critical decisions based on the daily number of new cases and deaths reported. Therefore, this study aims to predict the daily new deaths using four tree-based ensemble models i.e., Gradient Tree Boosting (GB), Random Forest (RF), Extreme Gradient Boosting (XGBoost), and Voting Regressor (VR) for the three most affected countries, which are the United States, Brazil, and India. The results showed that VR outperformed other models in predicting daily new deaths for all three countries. The predictions of daily new deaths made using VR for Brazil and India are very close to the actual new deaths, whereas the prediction of daily new deaths for the United States still needs to be improved.<br>


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document