IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/lue/wpaper/271.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Obama and the Macroeconomy Estimating Social Preferences Between Unemployment and Inflation

Author

Listed:
  • Soeren Enkelmann

    (Department of Economics, Leuphana University Lueneburg, Germany)

Abstract

This paper investigates social preferences towards unemployment and inflation in the United States. Estimating a popularity function with monthly data for the recent Obama administration, we find that U.S. voters react strongly to both unemployment and inflation. However, reducing unemployment is more important to society as voters would trade off 1 point of unemployment against 2.5 points of ination. One point of unemployment costs the president about 4 points, one point inflation costs him 1.5 point. Moreover, we provide evidence that macroeconomic preferences are not stable over time. Finally, we show that public preferences towards unemployment and inflation are not homogeneous across different groups in society. The poor and low-eduated, for example, react more strongly to changes in the unemployment rate than other groups.

Suggested Citation

  • Soeren Enkelmann, 2013. "Obama and the Macroeconomy Estimating Social Preferences Between Unemployment and Inflation," Working Paper Series in Economics 271, University of Lüneburg, Institute of Economics.
  • Handle: RePEc:lue:wpaper:271
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://www.leuphana.de/fileadmin/user_upload/Forschungseinrichtungen/ifvwl/WorkingPapers/lue/pdf/wp_271_Upload.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    More about this item

    Keywords

    social preference function; popularity function; unemployment; inflation; Obama;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • D72 - Microeconomics - - Analysis of Collective Decision-Making - - - Political Processes: Rent-seeking, Lobbying, Elections, Legislatures, and Voting Behavior
    • H11 - Public Economics - - Structure and Scope of Government - - - Structure and Scope of Government

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:lue:wpaper:271. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Joachim Wagner (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://leuphana.de/institute/ivwl.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.