Book
Reproducible Research with R and RStudio
Chapman and Hall/CRC Press. ISBN 978-1466572843. (Expected: July 2013)
Website
Published Articles
The Diffusion of Financial Supervisory Governance Ideas
Review of International Political Economy. Available online 2012.
Download: (Publication PDF or Pre-print PDF)
Download data and source code
Abstract
Who is watching the financial services industry? Since 1980, there have been multiple waves of thought about whether the ministry of finance, the central bank, a specialized regulator or some combination of these should have supervisory authority. These waves have been associated with the convergence of actual practices. How much and through what channels did internationally promoted ideas about supervisory ‘best practice’ influence institutional design choices? I use a new dataset of 83 countries and jurisdictions between the 1980s and 2007 to examine the diffusion of supervisory ideas. With this data, I employ Cox Proportional Hazard and Competing Risks Event History Analyses to evaluate the possible causal roles best practice policy ideas might have played. I find that banking crises and certain peer groups can encourage policy convergence on heavily promoted ideas.
Corrections: Figure 4 is based on estimates from model B6 not A7.
Also, the standard errors in the results tables are not negative.
(This was a LaTeX to Excel conversion error.)
Competing Risks and Deposit Insurance Governance Convergence
International Political Science Review. Forthcoming 2013.
Download PDF
Website with data, source code, and ancillary tables.
Abstract
Why do policies often seem to converge across countries at the same time? This question has been studied extensively in the diffusion literature. However, past research has not examined complex choice environments, especially where there are many alternatives. My paper aims to fill this gap in the literature. I show how Fine and Gray Competing Risks Event History Analysis can be used to tease apart the causes of policy convergence. I apply the method to an examination of the reasons why, from the mid-1990s to 2007, many countries created independent deposit insurers. I find an interaction between international recommendations and regional peers’ choices, particularly in the European Union. However, convergence appears to slow under the particular conditions of a banking crisis, regardless of how well independence was promoted. Possibly due to electoral incentives democracies seem to have been more likely to create independent insurers. Ultimately, I demonstrate how competing risks analysis can help enable future research on policy choices, complementing methods previously applied in political economy.
GitHub: A tool for social data set development and verification in the cloud
The Political Methodologist. 2013. 20(2): 2-7.
Download the published PDF.
A slightly updated PDF is available at SSRN.
Working Papers
Showing Estimates for Interactive and Nonlinear Effects from Cox Proportional Hazard Models
Download PDF
Abstract
The Cox Proportional Hazard (PH) model is a popular tool for political scientists examining cross- unit cross-time data. However, many researchers misspecify their models and poorly communicate uncertainty about their estimates. This is unfortunate because causes of model misspecification–e.g. interactive and nonlinear effects–may be substantively meaningful. Uncertainty about these effects can be difficult to assess because quantities of interest are on nonlinear scales. It has been difficult to explore and communicate these effects using available computational tools. This note improves the way researchers use Cox-type models by introducing a new R package–simPH. The packages makes it easier to graphically show quantities of interest estimated from Cox-type models and their associated uncertainty.
Inflated Expectations: How government partisanship shapes bureaucrat's inflation expectations
with Cassandra Grafström
Download PDF
Abstract
A government’s party identification can indicate the types of economic policies that it is likely to pursue. Left-party governments are expected to pursue policies that promote lower unemployment, but which may cause inflation. Right party governments are expected to pursue lower inflation policies. How do these expectations shape monetary policy bureaucrat’s inflation forecasts? If there is a mismatch between the policies bureaucrat’s expect governments to implement and those that they actually do, forecasts will be systematically biased. There is evidence that at least in the United States the real differences in policies implemented by left-leaning Democratic and right-leaning Republican presidents is minimal (Bartels, 2008). Using Fed staff’s Greenbook forecasts we test for presidential partisan biases. We find that irrespective of actual policy and economic conditions forecasters do systematically overestimate inflation during Democratic presidencies and underestimate inflation during Republican ones. Our findings suggest that Fed staff’s inflation forecasts are shaped by heuristic presidential partisan biases.
Bad Banks as a Response to Crises:
When Do Governments Use Them, and Why Does Their Governance Differ?
with Mark Hallerberg
Download PDF
Abstract
Many countries have used public asset management companies (AMCs, or “bad banks”) as part of strategies to restore their banking systems after crises. This includes the United States in the late 1980s, countries in East Asia and Latin America in the 1990s, and countries in Europe and Africa more recently. AMC structures, however, vary widely. Using a newly created global dataset of public bad banks, we begin to explore how domestic political institutions, international institutions, and international capital may be behind policymakers’ (a) decisions to create AMCs in response to crises as well as (b) design choices, particularly in terms of AMCs’ level of centralization. We find preliminary evidence that countries with low levels of reserves and many highly polarised veto players are more likely to create AMCs. We also confirm an important result from previous research that less democratic countries are more likely to create AMCs, but our evidence suggests that low levels of democracy may only affect decisions to create centralised AMCs, but not other types.
Two Sword Lengths: Losers' consent and violence in national legislatures
Download PDF
Map of legislative violence (1980 - 2011)
Abstract
National legislative chambers should be venues for peacefully resolving conflicts between opposing groups. However, they can sometimes become the scenes of physical violence between legislators. Legislative violence is an indication that a country's democratic institutions are functioning far from perfectly as legislative losers are deciding to drop out of the `game', rather than consent to the winners' decisions. In order to better understand these situations I use a new data set to examine what features are associated with violence in national legislative chambers. My main findings are that established democracies, democracies with highly proportional electoral outcomes and with large governing majorities are less likely to have legislative brawls. These results suggest that violence between legislators is less likely when the gaps between winners' and losers' experience, representation, preferences and power are smaller.
Getting What You Want: Information and crisis policymaking in Korea and Ireland
with Mícheál O'Keeffe
Download PDF
Abstract
Governments have a range of policy options for managing banking crises, but it can be difficult for them to determine and choose policies that will best further their aims. During banking crises, policymakers must rely on information from bureaucrats and actors in the financial system with differ- ent preferences. Moreover, initial crisis containment choices can constrain future resolution options. The 2008/09 banking crisis in Ireland and the following effective nationalisation of the banking sector reminds us that it can be difficult to actually choose policies that will successfully manage a crisis in a preferred direction. Our paper contrasts the Irish case with South Korea’s 1997 experience, where guarantee and ownership policy choices more closely matched decision-maker’s preferences. We build on Satyanath’s (2006) signaling approach to create a model of how decision-makers can be purposefully misled to make non-preferred choices. We examine the empirical plausibility of our model by comparing analytic narratives of Ireland’s and Korea’s crises. A key finding is Ireland, as a Eurozone member, did not need to listen to external actors giving more accurate information. Because of this, Irish decision-makers were unable to get what they wanted.
Work in Progress
- What the Fed Says: Content Analysis of US Federal Reserve Governor Speeches
(with Kevin Young)
- Show the Distribution, Not the Interval: Communicating Uncertainty in Epidemiology
- Building Better Bad Banks (with Mark Hallerberg)
- I Honestly Don't Know: Credibly Committing to Bad Information
