Facing into the wind's teeth: An interview with hal pepinsky

Editor's Note: The title of the interview comes from a poem by William Carlos Williams entitled The Manoeuvre. There Williams talks about seeing two starlings, just before alighting, turning in the air together backwards--but what got to him, he says, was that in doing so, they faced "into the wind's teeth." Commenting on the poem, Denise Levertov points out that, while it is a celebration of life, it also tells us that life sometimes requires adroit manoeuvering, its fullness emerging when we work not against but in cooperation with that which makes it most difficult. The interview speaks to this throughout.     

Victory without power: The Pm-Pendulum forecast

The “PM and Pendulum” model was adjusted for the 2015 General Election to take account of the Liberal-Democratic participation in government and the SNP surge. So adjusted, the model predicts a Tory vote victory by 3.4 percent over Labour. The seat forecast puts the Tories ahead with 287 seats to 263 for Labour, with 41 for the SNP. Thus another Hung Parliament! Ex-post estimates show that without the Lib-Dem adjustments the model would have predicted a Conservative majority.     

制度摩擦何以影响中国预算变迁? ——基于1992—2019年的中国预算变迁数据的实证研究

【问题】间断-均衡预算理论通过美国、欧洲等不同国家的联邦、州与地方政府的预算变迁得到检验,该理论对于中国政策过程和预算过程的适用性如何?制度摩擦假设是否能解释预算变迁的间断性?政治周期是否为替代性假设?【方法】论文通过利用1992—2019年的全国、中央和地方预决算数据,利用正态性检验、L-K值等计算方法实证分析了中国预决算变迁的间断性情况。除此之外,论文还采用了固定效应模型分析了政治周期对预算变迁间断性的影响。【发现】研究发现中国预算变迁遵循间断性逻辑,制度摩擦也是导致间断性差异的重要变量,其中所得税收入分享改革作为制度摩擦的代理变量对中央政府预算间断性的影响更为显著。为了检验间断性的政治周期替代性假设,通过比较党代会周期和中央领导人更替周期的间断性,发现政治周期对预算变迁并没有太明显的影响。【贡献】中国的预算变迁为间断-均衡预算理论提供了新的经验证据,这进一步证明了“一般间断假设”和“公共预算的一般经验法则”,从而为理论的外部有效性提供了更多证据。而制度摩擦和政治周期假设的检验为中国预算变迁的间断性提供了更明确的解释。     

Systematic Leadership and Trade Openness

Studies of hegemonic stability tend to specify periods when hegemony is present or absent in the world system. Periods in which hegemony is present are expected to exhibit openness for trade. Periods in which hegemony is absent should be associated with trade closure. Partially as a consequence of this nominal measurement strategy, scholars continue to be unsure whether hegemony and systemic leadership are linked to the openness of the world's trading system. We contend that analysts need to devote more attention to the sources of preponderance and less to its arbitrary presence or absence. Focusing on the U.S. from 1870 to 1990, we first articulate a theory linking certain political-economic systemic leadership variables to trade openness, in terms of the directions, signs, and diffusion speed of the causal links. We then estimate Granger causality and distributed lag models to test our predictions empirically. The empirical results support our theoretical interpretation. The Granger causalities between world trade openness and the systemic leadership variables are found to be reciprocal, with the effects of systemic leadership on world trade openness working faster than those of world trade openness on the hegemon. World trade openness exerts a negative effect on systemic leadership, while systemic leadership promotes world trade openness.