Business as usual: Politicians with business experience, government finances, and policy outcomes

Brian Beach and Daniel Jones

Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, 2016, vol. 131, issue PA, 292-307

Abstract: Are government finances and policy outcomes different under politicians with business experience? We study California city councils and implement a regression discontinuity strategy to provide causal evidence on this issue. Ultimately, we find no evidence that the election of a candidate with business experience impacts city expenditures, revenues, unemployment rates, and other outcomes. Future vote shares for candidates with business experience are also unaffected, which suggests that these politicians are not having an impact that is observed to voters but unobserved in our data.

Keywords: Political selection; Professional experience; Local government; City finances; Elections; Legislatures (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2016
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (8)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0167268116302013
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:jeborg:v:131:y:2016:i:pa:p:292-307

DOI: 10.1016/j.jebo.2016.09.010

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization is currently edited by Houser, D. and Puzzello, D.

More articles in Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().