Do Businessmen Make Good Governors?

This paper empirically evaluates the economic performance of U.S. state governors who came to the position from a business background (CEO governors), focusing on the growth rate of real personal income per capita, unemployment rate, and income inequality. Methodologically, we apply a matching metho...

Descrizione completa

Salvato in:
Dettagli Bibliografici
Pubblicato in:MAGKS - Joint Discussion Paper Series in Economics (Band 19-2015)
Autore principale: Neumeier, Florian
Natura: Articolo
Lingua:inglese
Pubblicazione: Philipps-Universität Marburg 2015
Soggetti:
Accesso online:PDF Full Text
Tags: Aggiungi Tag
Nessun Tag, puoi essere il primo ad aggiungerne!!
Descrizione
Riassunto:This paper empirically evaluates the economic performance of U.S. state governors who came to the position from a business background (CEO governors), focusing on the growth rate of real personal income per capita, unemployment rate, and income inequality. Methodologically, we apply a matching method to account for the endogeneity of political selection. Using entropy balancing, we identify credible counterfactuals for CEO governors, that is, governors without a business background who took office under similar economic and fiscal situations. We find, first, that businesspeople tend to take office in times of economic and fiscal strain. Second, the tenures of CEO governors are associated with a 0.6 percentage points higher annual income growth rate and a 0.6 percentage points lower unemployment rate than are the tenures of non-CEO governors. Also, state-level income inequality decreases when CEO governors hold office, indicating that low-income households benefit from the economic upswing. Third, the positive effect of having a CEO governor increases with time in office. Fourth, Republican CEO governors perform slightly better than their Democratic colleagues.
Descrizione fisica:32 Seiten
ISSN:1867-3678
DOI:10.17192/es2024.0379