André Reslow
Welcome to my website!
I am PhD candidate in Economics at Uppsala University. I am also affiliated with Sveriges Riksbank and Uppsala Centre for Fiscal Studies (UCFS).
I will be on the 2020/2021 academic job market. You find my Job Market Paper below, and my CV here.
My main research interests are in the fields of Political Economy and Macroeconomics.
My thesis studies the behavior (or misbehavior) of macroeconomic forecasters and how this affects other agents in the economy. Especially the relationship between forecasters and voters are in focus.
I was a visiting PhD student at the Department of Economics, New York University, during the 2018/2019 academic year. I hold an M.Sc. in Econometrics and a B.Sc. in Economics from Stockholm University.
Contact: andre.reslow@nek.uu.se Google Scholar Research Gate
My Job Market Paper
Electoral Cycles in Macroeconomic Forecasts
This paper investigates whether governments release over-optimistic forecasts for GDP growth approaching elections. High-frequency data at the forecaster level from the United States, Sweden, and the United Kingdom document that governments overestimate short-term GDP growth by 0.16–0.31 percentage points in the months approaching a vote. Consistent with a model of political selection, in which the incumbent government releases optimistic forecasts to signal high ability in order to increase re-election probability, we find that the bias is larger when the incumbent government is not term-limited or constrained by a parliament led by the opposition. Moreover, the bias is allocated across different forecast horizons based on election seasonality. We also show that a reform that outsourced the main forecasting function from the HM Treasury in the United Kingdom to a newly formed government agency reduced the overall bias of forecasts, but not the electoral cyclicality.