http://www.eriposte.com/economy/other/demovsrep.htmHere is another one
http://www.sims.berkeley.edu/~hal/people/hal/NYTimes/2003-11-20.htmlWhich Party in the White House Means Good Times for Investors?
By HAL R. VARIAN
OES the stock market do better when a Republican is president or when a Democrat is?
The answer is: It's not even close. The stock market does far better under Democrats.
This perhaps surprising finding is examined by two finance professors at the University of California at Los Angeles, Pedro Santa-Clara and Rossen Valkanov, in an article titled "Political Cycles and the Stock Market," published in the October issue of The Journal of Finance.
Professors Santa-Clara and Valkanov look at the excess market return - the difference between a broad index of stock prices (basically the Standard & Poor's 500-stock index) and the three-month Treasury bill rate - between 1927 and 1998. The excess return measures how attractive stock investments are compared with completely safe investments like short-term T-bills.
Using this measure, they find that during those 72 years the stock market returned about 11 percent more a year under Democratic presidents and 2 percent more under Republicans - a striking difference.
This nine-percentage-point excess can be broken down further into an average 5.3 percent higher real return for the stock market and a 3.7 percent lower return for Treasury bills under Democratic administrations.
This finding raises three other questions. First, is this just some data anomaly resulting from selective choice of sample or quirks of the analysis?
Second, if the effect is real, why don't investors take advantage of the predictable higher returns and buy stocks before elections that Democrats are likely to win, in that way pushing stock prices up and lowering returns? The third, and perhaps the most provocative, question: What is the economic rationale for the difference in returns?
A Diary on this issue from Daily Kos
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2005/4/27/201155/374OK, another one:
Republicans Aren’t Even Good for the Rich
By Robert S. McElvaine
Mr. McElvaine teaches history at Millsaps College in Jackson, Mississippi, is the author of Eve's Seed: Biology, the Sexes, and the Course of History, and is currently completing his first novel and screenplay.
"The Republicans only help the rich." We hear it all the time, and there is rarely disagreement over any word in the sentence other than "only." Almost everyone accepts it as axiomatic that Republican administrations and their policies are beneficial to the rich; the argument is over whether they are also helpful to other income groups. It seems certain that the socio-economic segment of the electorate most solidly in favor of the reelection of George W. Bush is the very rich. If the readership of the Wall Street Journal were a state, it would appear on the electoral map as even more brilliantly red than Mississippi.
No one ever seems to stop to ask the key question: Why?
Asking such a question is considered a waste of time. There are certain things that everyone knows. The rich get richer faster during Republican administrations. Such self-evident "facts" are accepted without reference to evidence. Yet there is evidence available against which to test the belief, which most rich people seem to accept as an article of faith, that Republican administrations are better for the rich.
United States Census Bureau data on mean household income from the beginning of the Nixon Administration through 2002 (the last year for which these data are currently available) show that this almost universally held belief is simply, almost spectacularly, wrong. During that period, Republicans held the White House for 22 years and Democrats for 12 years. In constant 2002 dollars, the average annual gain in income by the richest five percent of American households under Republicans (Nixon, Ford, Reagan, and the two Bushes) was $1706. Under Democrats (Carter and Clinton), the richest five percent saw their income rise by an annual average of $6,921.
The startling bottom line is that over the last three-plus decades the income of the richest Americans has risen at a rate four times faster under Democrats than under Republicans.
http://hnn.us/articles/8301.html
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