We have succesfully estimated the public's indifference map between inflation and unemployment. The indifference curves are nonlinear and concave to the origin for most unemployment rates; the data are insufficient to permit us to be sure of the form at low unemployment rates. There is clear...

The political business cycle hypothesis has been criticized on the grounds that it is impossible for governments to generate a vote winning boom because voters judge political candidates by the performance they expect in the future. In this paper, the authors directly test the hypothesis that...