The Global Economic Impact of Politicians: Evidence from an International Survey Rct

Abstract

We use the US presidential election on 3 November 2020 to examine how the US president influences economic expectations of international experts. We design a large-scale RCT among 843 experts working in 107 countries, asking about their expectations regarding GDP growth, unemployment, inflation, and trade in their country. The sample is split randomly in two subsamples. Half of the participants were surveyed closely before the election, the other half directly after Joe Biden had been called US president. Our results show that the election of Joe Biden increased growth expectations of international experts by 0.98 percentage points for the year 2021. We also find that (i) treatment effects materialize only in the short-run and (ii) experts' uncertainty increased after the election. Our results suggest that exceptional politicians influence global economic outcomes.

Political Shocks and Inflation Expectations: Evidence from the 2022 Russian Invasion of Ukraine

“…Our study also contributes to the literature using political events as natural experiments for causal identification. Previous research has used the US presidential election to identify the effect of exceptional politicians on economic expectations of international experts (Boumans et al, 2021). The results of our study are consistent with prior work, showing that major political shocks have far-reaching impact on the formation of expectations of academic professionals.…”

Collective memories on the 2010 European debt crisis

“…The survey includes many questions, indicating the opinion towards overall economic development from European and non-European experts such as economic growth and inflation. Furthermore, scholars used the WES to ask a limited number of one-off questions in individual survey waves (Andre et al., 2019; Boumans et al., 2018, 2021; Gründler and Potrafke, 2020a, 2020b; Mosler et al., 2019). Our questions on the 2010 European debt crisis were included in the WES survey in August 2018.…”