TY - JOUR A1 - Gandrud, Christopher T1 - simPH: An R Package for Illustrating Estimates from Cox Proportional Hazard Models Including for Interactive and Nonlinear Effects JF - Journal of Statistical Software N2 - The R package simPH provides tools for effectively communicating results from Cox proportional hazard (PH) models, including models with interactive and nonlinear effects. The Cox (PH) model is a popular tool for examining event data. However, previously available computational tools have not made it easy to explore and communicate quantities of interest and associated uncertainty estimated from them. This is especially true when the effects are interactions or nonlinear transformations of continuous variables. These transformations are especially useful with Cox PH models because they can be employed to correctly specifying models that would otherwise violate the nonproportional hazards assumption. Package simPH makes it easy to simulate and then plot quantities of interest for a variety of effects estimated from Cox PH models including interactive effects, nonlinear effects, as well as standard linear effects. Package simPH employs visual weighting in order to effectively communicate estimation uncertainty. There are options to show either the standard central interval of the simulation’s distribution or the shortest probability interval – which can be useful for asymmetrically distributed estimates. This paper uses hypothetical and empirical examples to illustrate package simPH’s syntax and capabilities. Y1 - 2015 UR - https://nbn-resolving.org/urn:nbn:de:kobv:b1570-opus4-15483 U6 - https://doi.org/10.18637/jss.v065.i03 SN - 1548-7660 N1 - There are supplements to the paper available for download following the DOI. VL - 65 IS - 3 SP - 1 EP - 20 PB - University of California at Los Angeles CY - Los Angeles ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Gandrud, Christopher A1 - Grafström, Cassandra T1 - Inflated Expectations: How government partisanship shapes monetary policy bureaucrats’ inflation forecasts JF - Political Science Research and Methods N2 - Governments’ party identifications can indicate the types of economic policies they are likely to pursue. A common rule of thumb is that left-party governments are expected to pursue policies for lower unemployment, but which may cause inflation. Right-party governments are expected to pursue lower inflation policies. How do these expectations shape the inflation forecasts of monetary policy bureaucrats? If there is a mismatch between the policies bureaucrats expect governments to implement and those that they actually do, forecasts will be systematically biased. Using US Federal Reserve Staff’s forecasts we test for executive partisan biases. We find that irrespective of actual policy and economic conditions forecasters systematically overestimate future inflation during left-party presidencies and underestimate future inflation during right-party ones. Our findings suggest that partisan heuristics play an important part in monetary policy bureaucrats’ inflation expectations. Y1 - 2015 UR - https://nbn-resolving.org/urn:nbn:de:kobv:b1570-opus4-15496 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1017/psrm.2014.34 SN - 2049-8470 VL - 3 IS - 2 SP - 353 EP - 380 PB - Cambridge Univ. Press CY - Cambridge ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Gandrud, Christopher A1 - Hallerberg, Mark T1 - When all is said and done: updating “Elections, special interests, and financial crisis” JF - Research and Politics N2 - How do elections affect the costliness of financial crises to taxpayers? Previous research contends that more electorally competitive countries choose policies that are less costly to taxpayers. In this paper, we update Keefer’s seminal 2007 article published in International Organization with revised data. The original article found that more electorally competitive countries had lower fiscal costs from responding to crises. The commonly used IMF/World Bank data set Keefer employed has since been extensively corrected and expanded. We update the original analysis with the newest version of this data set. After doing so, we find no evidence for an association between electoral competitiveness and the fiscal costs of responding to financial crises both within the original sample and outside of it. Our update highlights a broader methodological lesson: that the costs of responding to financial crises can take many years to be settled. Future research should explicitly address and model this delayed cost resolution. KW - Financial crisis KW - Fiscal policy KW - Electoral competitiveness Y1 - 2015 UR - https://nbn-resolving.org/urn:nbn:de:kobv:b1570-opus4-15509 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1177/2053168015589335 SN - 2053-1680 VL - 2 IS - 3 SP - 1 EP - 9 PB - Sage CY - London [u.a.] ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Gandrud, Christopher A1 - Hallerberg, Mark T1 - Does Banking Union Worsen the EU’s Democratic Deficit? The Need for Greater Supervisory Data Transparency JF - Journal of Common Market Studies N2 - Does banking union exacerbate the European Union’s democratic deficit? Using Scharpf’s ‘input’ and ‘output’ legitimacy concepts, it is argued in this article that its design does worsen the democratic deficit. There are good reasons to limit ‘input legitimacy’ for politically independent institutions. ‘Output legitimacy’ is then even more relevant. Transparency is a key part of ‘output legitimacy’. It enables actors to judge whether the regulator is acting in the public’s interest and can improve their outputs. This article focuses on the banking data that the supervisors collect. Data available to the European public is evaluated and compared to America’s banking union. European practices are not comparable in terms of availability or detail. An original survey of relevant officials is conducted, which results in the finding that only 11 of 28 Member States release any information on the banks they supervise. Both EU and national supervisors should provide publicly available, timely and consistent individual bank data. Y1 - 2015 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1111/jcms.12226 SN - 0021-9886 SN - 1468-5965 VL - 53 IS - 4 SP - 769 EP - 785 PB - Blackwell CY - Oxford [u.a.] ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Gandrud, Christopher A1 - Hallerberg, Mark A1 - Deo, Sahil A1 - Franz, Christian T1 - Preventing German Bank Failures: Federalism and decisions to save troubled banks JF - Politische Vierteljahresschrift N2 - We examine government decisions to support troubled banks. Our contribution is the examination of how federalism can affect decisions to classify banks as systemically important. Whether a bank is viewed by politicians as ‘systemically important’ varies based on how its failure would affect supporters of the government. How a federation is designed has a strong influence on which banks are given public assistance. Where the top level of government is solely responsible for banks, there will be fewer systemically important institutions and so more banks will be allowed to fail. Where lower levels are responsible, governments will allow fewer failures. We use this approach to understand government support for failing banks in Germany. Our findings are relevant for the European Banking Union. Y1 - 2015 UR - https://nbn-resolving.org/urn:nbn:de:kobv:b1570-opus4-15475 U6 - https://doi.org/10.5771/0032-3470-2015-2-159 SN - 0032-3470 VL - 56 IS - 2 SP - 159 EP - 181 PB - Westdt. Verl. CY - Köln [u.a.] ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Gandrud, Christopher A1 - Hallerberg, Mark T1 - Statistical Agencies and Responses to Financial Crises : Eurostat, Bad Banks and the ESM JF - West European Politics Y1 - 2016 ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Gandrud, Christopher T1 - Competing risks and deposit insurance governance convergence JF - International Political Science Review N2 - Why do policies often seem to converge across countries at the same time? This question has been studied extensively in the diffusion literature. However, past research has not examined complex choice environments, especially where there are many alternatives. This article fills this gap in the literature. I show how Fine and Gray’s Competing Risks Event History Analysis can be used to tease apart the causes of policy convergence. I apply the method to an examination of the reasons why, from the mid-1990s to 2007, many countries created independent deposit insurers. I find an interaction between international recommendations and regional peers’ choices, particularly in the European Union. However, convergence appears to slow under the particular conditions of a banking crisis, regardless of how well independence is promoted. Possibly due to electoral incentives, democracies seem to have been more likely to create independent insurers. Ultimately, I demonstrate how competing risks analysis can help enable future research on policy choices, complementing methods previously applied in political economy. KW - Deposit insurance KW - Event history analysis KW - Financial policy KW - Diffusion KW - Banking crisis Y1 - 2013 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1177/0192512113485333 SN - 1460373X VL - 35 IS - 2 SP - 195 EP - 215 PB - Sage CY - Los Angeles [u.a.] ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Hallerberg, Mark A1 - Gandrud, Christopher T1 - The Measurement of Real-Time Perceptions of Financial Stress: Implications for Political Science JF - British Journal of Political Science N2 - How do politicians and voters respond to financial market stress, and with what political effects? Previous research addressing these questions lacks a crucial variable: a continuous, real-time indicator of the level of financial market stress that policy makers and voters perceived. We need a measure of actors’contemporary perceptions of financial market conditions to understand why they made a given choice and with what effects. Previous binary crisis measures are constructed post hoc, so tend to be biased towards severe crises and away from circumstances in which governments effectively responded to emerging trouble. As such, they suffer from clear selection bias. Annual post hoc measures do not necessarily capture conditions as they were perceived at the time of events such as elections. As dichotomous indicators, they do not measure crisis severity or how it varies over time. They use ad hoc methods to determine when crises have ended. Previous continuous measures of financial market stress are less common and suffer from other problems. They capture quantities whose importance, measurement, and reporting varies significantly across countries and over time. To overcome these issues, we develop a continuous measure of real-time perceptions of financial market stress with a kernel principal component analysis (KPCA) of detailed qualitative data, namely monthly Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU) reports. We call it the EIU Perceptions of Financial Market Stress Index, or FinStress for short. FinStress enables new political research possibilities. As a continuous measure, it could be used to examine which policies can effectively prevent or reduce extreme stress, and which political conditions are conducive to implementing these policies. As a comparable continuous monthly indicator, FinStress could be used to test hypotheses that rely on sub-annual data and follow the intensity of stress over time. Here we provide examples for studying the impact of financial market stress on voters’choices and on revisions to European Union government budget figures. We thus contribute to the wider methodological toolkit by showing how KPCA can be used to summarize vast quantities of similarly formatted qualitative texts into continuous cross-sectional time-series indicators. Y1 - 2017 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1017/S0007123417000291 SP - 1 EP - 13 ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Hallerberg, Mark A1 - Gandrud, Christopher T1 - Explaining variation and change in supervisory confidentiality in the European Union JF - West European Politics N2 - Some European Union member states’ financial regulators choose to make some of the data they routinely collect on individual banks publicly available. Others treat this data as confidential. What explains this difference? This paper considers the possible effects of crises, path-dependent legal institutions, and the design of deposit insurance schemes. At the national level, the paper focuses on contrasting German and Dutch cases. After the recent economic crisis, the Dutch released more data while the German authorities maintained strict confidentiality rules. The design of deposit insurance schemes provides a key reason why the level of secrecy varies, with the Dutch move from an ex post to an ex ante scheme where the government served as the ultimate backstop leading to questions about the accounts of individual banks while the German system favoured continued secrecy. The paper also describes the level of transparency at the EU level. Multilevel legal restrictions and bureaucratic capacity tilt EU banking union practices towards member states that treat financial supervisory data as confidential. Y1 - 2018 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1080/01402382.2017.1389421 SN - 0140-2382 N1 - Published online: 06 Nov 2017 VL - 41 IS - 4, Secrecy in Europe SP - 1025 EP - 1048 ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Hallerberg, Mark A1 - Copelovitch, Mark A1 - Gandrud, Christopher T1 - Financial Data Transparency, International Institutions, and Sovereign Borrowing Costs JF - International Studies Quarterly N2 - Recent events in international finance illustrate the close connection between the viability of a country's major private financial institutions and the sustainability of its sovereign debt. We explore the precise nature of this connection and the ways in which it shapes investors’ expectations of sovereign creditworthiness. We consider how investors use the overall level of information available about the private financial sector—and the potential risks it poses to government finances—when making decisions about investing in sovereign debt. We expect that governments providing more information about the private financial sector will have lower, and less volatile, borrowing costs. In order to test this argument, we create a new Financial Data Transparency (FDT) Index measuring governments’ willingness to release credible financial system data. Using the FDT and a sample of high-income OECD countries, we find that such transparency reduces sovereign borrowing costs. The effects are conditional on the level of public indebtedness. Transparent countries with low debt enjoy lower and less volatile borrowing costs. Y1 - 2018 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1093/isq/sqx082 SN - 1468-2478 VL - 62 IS - 1 SP - 23 EP - 41 ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Hallerberg, Mark A1 - Gandrud, Christopher T1 - Interpreting fiscal accounting rules in the European Union JF - Journal of European Public Policy N2 - In the European Union, the creation of public debt statistics starts with member state governments’ reports. The EU’s statistical agency – Eurostat – then revises. How do these actors’ incentives shape reported numbers? Governments have incentives to take a more favourable view of often ambiguous accounting rules than Eurostat. Lower debt improves governments’ performance with domestic and external audiences. Eurostat is tasked with monitoring budgets for ‘excessive’ debts. We expect governments to present debt figures that Eurostat then revises upwards. This is more likely when governments have high debts, especially when in the eurozone, and prior to elections. Financial crises heighten the number of policies needing interpretation and both actors have more incentives to shape the numbers. We examine these propositions using Eurostat’s debt revisions. We find debts are revised upwards more for eurozone countries with higher debt levels and years with unscheduled elections. Financial stress strengthens these effects. Y1 - 2017 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1080/13501763.2017.1300182 SN - 1466-4429 VL - 24 IS - 6 SP - 832 EP - 851 ER -