Score contribution per author:
α: calibrated so average coauthorship-adjusted count equals average raw count
One result of the revitalized literature on political business cycles is that there are signs in German data that elections and ideology have an impact. However, using monthly data for the period 1950-89, and standard methods of time series analysis, the authors reject both the Nordhaus hypothesis of opportunistic cycles and the partisan approaches by D. A. Hibbs and A. Alesina. They show that some results are sensitive to the assumption of stationarity. There are signs of policy cycles in M1. It is hard, though, to bring this in line with the Rogoff hypothesis of rational opportunistic cycles because of the German institutional setting. Copyright 1997 by Kluwer Academic Publishers