We take a new look at electoral sectionalism and dynamic nationalization in presidential elections. We treat this problem as one of synchronism of electoral cycles, which we estimate by using wavelets. After providing a self-contained introduction to wavelet analysis, we use it to assess the...

Many political systems with direct democracy mechanisms have adopted rules preventing decisions from being made by simple majority rule. The device most commonly added to majority rule in national is a quorum requirement. The two most common are the participation and the approval quora. Such...

We estimate the U.S. New Keynesian Phillips Curve in the time-frequency domain with continuous wavelet tools, to provide an integrated answer to the three most controversial issues on the Phillips Curve. (1) Has the short-run tradeoff been stable? (2) What has been the role of expectations? (3)...

This paper offers a plausible explanation for the close link between oil prices and aggregate macroeconomic performance in the 1970s. Although this link has been well documented in the empirical literature, standard economic models are not able to replicate this link when actual oil prices are...

Goodwin's predator—prey model is structurally unstable, with an equilibrium that is neither stable nor unstable. Ploeg showed that relaxing the hypothesis of fixed proportion technology would stabilize the equilibrium. On the other hand, Goodwin showed that the equilibrium becomes...

We assess U.S. monetary policy across time and frequencies in the framework of the Taylor Rule (TR). First, we portray the deviations between policy interest rates and the TR-prescribed rates with a set of continuous wavelet tools, comprising the coherency, phase-difference and gain. Then, using...

A body of work using the continuous wavelet transform has been growing. We provide a self-contained summary on its most relevant theoretical results, describe how such transforms can be implemented in practice, and generalize the concept of simple coherency to partial wavelet coherency and...