A special thanks to Dr. Michael R. Scheessele for his time and valuable advice. I would also like to thank Dr. James Wolfer and Dr. Yi Cheng, for their time and useful comments.

A rich array of institutional diversity makes the United States an excellent place to study the relationship between political institutions and public policy outcomes. This essay has three main aims. First, it reviews existing empirical evidence on the relationship between institutional rules, political representation and policy outcomes. It aims to place the literature into a broader context of theoretical and empirical work in the field of political economy. Second, it develops a parallel empirical analysis that updates studies in the literature and re-examines some of the claims made, in a setting unified both in terms of policy outcomes and the period under study. Third, the paper develops some new directions for research, presenting a small number of novel exploratory results.

This paper provides a theoretical framework for analyzing the impact of the marriage market and divorce legislation on household labor supply. In our approach, the sex ratio in the marriage market and the rules governing divorce are examples of “distribution factors.” These factors are defined as variables that affect the household mem-bers ’ bargaining position but not preferences or the joint budget set. We extend the collective labor supply model developed by Chiappori to allow for distribution factors. We show that our model imposes new restrictions on the labor supply functions and eases the identification of individual preferences and the intrahousehold decision process. The model is estimated using PSID data for the year 1988. Our results do not reject the restrictions imposed by the model. Also, the sex ratio and divorce laws deemed favorable to women are found to affect labor supply behavior and the decision process in the directions predicted by the theory and to have sizable effects. This research received financial support from the Fonds pour la Formation de Cher-cheurs et l’Aide a ̀ la Recherche, the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of

This paper discusses the short-mn tradeoffbetween inflation and unemployment. Although this tradeoff remains a necessary building block of business cycle theory, economists have yet to provide a completely satisfactory explanation for it. According to the consensus view among central bankers and monetary economists, a contractionary monetary shock raises unemployment, at least temporarily, and leads to a delayed and gradual fall in inflation. Standard dynamic models of price adjustment, however, carmot explain this pattern of responses. Reconciling the consensus view about the effects of monetary policy with models of price adjustment remains an outstanding puzzle for business cycle theorists.

to transform this project from a sketchy concept into a presentable thesis. I would also like to thank Dr. Morteza Shafii-Mousavi and Dr. James Wolfer for all their help in reviewing this thesis and helping to polish it up. Finally, I would like to thank my wife Cathy and son Jordan for all their support

This paper studies the consumption decisions of agents who face costs of acquiring, absorbing and processing information. These consumers rationally choose to only sporadically update their information and re-compute their optimal consumption plans. In between updating dates, they remain inattentive. This behavior implies that news disperses slowly throughout the population, so events have a gradual and delayed effect on aggregate consumption. The model predicts that aggregate consumption adjusts slowly to shocks, and is able to explain the excess sensitivity and excess smoothness puzzles. In addition, individual consumption is sensitive to ordinary and unexpected past news, but it is not sensitive to extraordinary or predictable events. The model further predicts that some people rationally choose to not plan, live hand-to-mouth, and save less, while other people sporadically update their plans. The longer are these plans, the more they save. Evidence using U.S. aggregate and microeconomic data generally supports these predictions.

There are two fundamentally different views of the role of elections in policy formation. In one view, voters can affect candidates ’ policy choices: competition for votes induces politicians to move toward the center. In this view, elections have the effect of bringing about some degree of policy compromise. In the alternative view, voters merely elect policies: politicians cannot make credible promises to moderate their policies, and elections are merely a means to decide which one of two opposing policy views will be implemented. We assess which of these contrasting perspectives is more empirically relevant for the U. S. House. Focusing on elections decided by a narrow margin allows us to generate quasi-experimental estimates of the impact of a “randomized ” change in electoral strength on subsequent representatives ’ roll-call voting records. We find that voters merely elect policies: the degree of electoral strength has no effect on a legislator’s voting behavior. For example, a large exogenous increase in electoral strength for the Democratic party in a district does not result in shifting both parties ’ nominees to the left. Politicians ’ inability to credibly commit to a compromise appears to dominate any competition-induced convergence in policy. I.

This paper estimates micro-econometric happiness equations for the United States and Great Britain. Reported levels of wellbeing have declined over the last quarter of a century in the US; life satisfaction has run approximately flat through time in Britain. These

This paper theoretically and empirically documents a puzzle that arises when an RBC economy with a job matching function is used to model unemployment. The standard model can generate sufficiently large cyclical fluctuations in unemployment, or a sufficiently small response of unemployment to labor market policies, but it cannot do both. Variable search and separation, finite UI benefit duration, efficiency wages, and capital all fail to resolve this puzzle. However, either sticky wages or match-specific productivity shocks can improve the model’s performance by making the firm’s flow of surplus more procyclical, which makes hiring more procyclical too.

In completing this graduate thesis, I am grateful for the support and encouragement that many people have provided to me. I would like to thank Dr. James Wolfer for teaching, advising, and encouraging me throughout this journey. I would also like to thank my thesis committee members, Dr. Dana