Susan Washburn Taylor

Unraveling the Academic Productivity of Economists: The Opportunity Costs of Teaching and Service

This study investigates the relationships among research productivity, teaching, and service on the basis of individual-specific information involving approximately 715 academic economists. Responding to an online survey, these economists provided information regarding their teaching and service commitments as well as personal and institutional information. The publication record of each respondent was then obtained from EconLit. Together, these data constitute a rich field for the systematic study of research productivity. Results of a Tobit analysis reveal much about the nature of research productivity, underscoring, for instance, the importance of gender, coauthorship, presentations at conferences, and peers who publish. Among the more important findings from this analysis is that both teaching and service commitments have a significantly negative impact on the research productivity of academic economists. These relations hold across types of academic employer, though to varying degrees. Taken together, the results provide interesting insights into the roles of academic scholars, teachers, and colleagues.

Voters and Macroeconomics: Are They Forward Looking or Backward Looking?

The political business cycle hypothesis has been criticized on the grounds that it is impossible for governments to generate a vote winning boom because voters judge political candidates by the performance they expect in the future. In this paper, we directly test the hypothesis that voters are forward rather than backward looking. We compare the conventional view that presidential popularity depends on recently observed inflation and unemployment to three alternative models which assume varying forms of forward looking behavior. Non-tested hypothesis tests reject the forward looking models in favor of the one with the recent actual variables.

Presidential popularity: what matters most, macroeconomics or scandals?

What accounts for the widely divergent impact of political scandal on the Nixon and Clinton administrations? This article argues that the extent to which an administration suffers in the publics eye from a scandal depends on the economic conditions prevailing at the time. Using Gallup poll data, it estimates a quadratic social preference function for each administration and finds that the impact of Watergate on Nixons decline in the polls has been over-emphasized and that the Lewinsky affair had no impact on Clintons popularity. The role of the economy contributed more to political success or failure in both cases than did scandal.

Public Perceptions of Macroeconomic Policy during the Bush Presidency

This paper analyzes the publics perceptions of macroeconomic policy during the Bush presidency. It links the publics view of President Bushs performance with respect to unemployment and inflation to the actual behavior of unemployment and inflation and the publics expectations of their future behavior. We find that both the level of unemployment and the expected change in unemployment significantly influenced the publics perception of the presidents performance. Inflation and expectations about inflation did not play an important role.

Do group-specific or national unemployment rates influence perceptions?

Abstract We show that disaggregated social preference functions between inflation and unemployment may be modelled using the national unemployment rate rather than group-specific rates. We reach this conclusion by fitting presidential popularity functions to groups classified by age, region, sex and race.