Tonight (Tuesday, 10/30) Amnesty International is hosting a panel of Lawrence professors talking about the presidential candidates at 7 p.m. in the Cinema. In addition to human rights issues, the panel will address the potential economic implications of the upcoming elections. In preparation for the panel, I took a look for some general sentiment from the economics profession. Here are a few choice items:
- The Council on Foreign Relations provides a background brief, The Candidates and the Economy.
- Yale’s Zack Cooper gives an overview of the candidates and U.S. healthcare situation at Vox.
- Nicholas Bloom and his colleagues talk about the role of policy uncertainty, and in particular the role of polarization, also at Vox.
My first-order reaction was that it doesn’t matter much one way or the other who gets put into office in terms of the broad macro implications, but that is possibly because my macro expertise isn’t what it might be. It’s pretty clear that November’s winner will have a pretty pronounced influence on certain aspects of administrative regulation, with possibly significant implications for the energy and health care sectors.
UPDATE: Here are some links to works discussed this evening:
Andrew Gelman, Red State, Blue State, Rich State, Poor State, Why Americans Vote the Way They Do. (Article in Quarterly Journal of Political Science and link to the Book).
Thomas Frank, What’s the Matter with Kansas?