Research from Department of Economics featured in The Washington Post

Who loses in a government shutdown? Six months into the fiscal year, the US federal government is without a budget and a government shutdown is on the horizon. The Washington Post cites research from the Department of Economics arguing the entire US Congress, and not just the majority Republican party, may suffer political costs from their inability to pass a budget, while President Obama can escape unharmed.

Asger Lau Andersen, David Dreyer Lassen and Lasse Holbøll Westh Nielsen have analyzed the political consequences of not passing budgets on time in US states in a paper presented at last year’s Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association. These results strongly suggest that it is predominantly legislatures that are blamed when a budget is not passed on time and that voters punish legislators in subsequent elections. The paper is currently being prepared for publication in an academic journal, and it is part of a larger project investigating the causes of consequences of late budgets.