The Political Economy of Policy Choice: Evidence from State Level Data

9320894案例本研究的目的是调查国家政策选择的决定因素，并考虑这些政策的经济原因和影响之间的相互作用。 最近的许多论文利用跨州的政策变化，以确定国家政策变化对一些经济结果变量的影响。 例如，各州有不同的最低工资，这些最低工资在不同的时间点变化，这一事实提供了一种调查最低工资对失业影响的手段。 这种情况通常被称为“自然实验”。 本项目的目标是阐明这种方法的价值，区分适用的情况和不适用的情况。将使用的数据来自作者收集的美国40年（1950年至1990年）的州数据库，并在他们以前的工作中使用。 他们还将使用CPS即将离任的轮换小组的数据。 后者构成了一个新的方法来实证研究政治经济学问题。 ***

9320894 Case The aim of this research is to investigate the determinants of state policy choices and to consider the interplay between the economic causes and effects of such policies. Many recent papers have exploited cross state variation in policies, in order to identify the effects of a state policy change on some economic outcome variable of interest. For example, the fact that states have different minimum wages and that these wage floors change at different points in time provides a means of investigating the effect of minimum wages on unemployment. Such cases are often referred to as "natural experiments". The goal in this project is to clarify the value of this approach, distinguishing cases where it is applicable from those where it is not, The data that will be used are drawn from a state data base for the United States assembled by the authors for a forty year period (1950 to 1990) and used in their prior work. They will also use data from the out-going rotation groups of the CPS. The latter constitutes a novel approach to empirically investigating political economy questions. ***