IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/oup/qjecon/v115y2000i1p305-339..html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Policy Boards and Policy Smoothing

Author

Listed:
  • Christopher J. Waller

Abstract

Partisan politics and random election outcomes generate policy uncertainty and partisan business cycles. To reduce policy uncertainty, society must design the policy-making environment to overcome electoral uncertainty and partisanship. I show that delegating policy to an independent policy board with discretionary powers will produce substantial policy smoothing and lower policy uncertainty relative to a simple model in which elected officials set policy. Board members are chosen in a partisan, noncooperative environment; yet in the benchmark model, policy variability is eliminated, and the cooperative bargaining solution is replicated.

Suggested Citation

  • Christopher J. Waller, 2000. "Policy Boards and Policy Smoothing," The Quarterly Journal of Economics, Oxford University Press, vol. 115(1), pages 305-339.
  • Handle: RePEc:oup:qjecon:v:115:y:2000:i:1:p:305-339.
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://hdl.handle.net/10.1162/003355300554665
    Download Restriction: Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    More about this item

    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:oup:qjecon:v:115:y:2000:i:1:p:305-339.. 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: Oxford University Press (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://academic.oup.com/qje .

    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.