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The purpose of this paper is to investigate whether legislators vote in two distinct regimes as suggested by the US political system & whether these voting patterns can be explained by economic variables. The paper exploits US Roll-Call votes from a rich unbalanced panel data set of 540 legislative positions over 104 congressional sessions & presidents since the Korean War. The paper employs a variant of the Hamilton Regime-Switching Model (1989) to uncover three major patterns in the data. There appear to be two distinct regimes closely related though not identical to the two-party system. Shifts in these regimes are most frequent in presidential elections & are less frequent in the Senate & the House. Finally, since WWII, economic variables do not seem to influence the shifts implying that these political shocks are exogenous. However, over longer horizons, recessions do tend to force political change in the legislature. 7 Tables, 5 Figures, 33 References. Adapted from the source document.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the effect of the FDI decision on domestic investment in the case of Taiwanese manufacturing firms. In addition, we also consider the deferral effect of the FDI decision and the role of firm size. To this end, this paper takes advantage of an endogenous switching model from which consistent estimators are obtained after correcting for the self‐selection problem. The empirical results show that the effect of these manufacturing firms' FDI decisions on domestic investment is significant within the firms. Furthermore, a crowding‐out effect of FDI on domestic investment is found when Taiwanese firms engage in defensive FDI. Finally, FDI is found to have a positive influence on the domestic investment of the larger firms, while the influence is negative in the case of the smaller firms.

State‐switching models combine immense flexibility with relative mathematical simplicity and computational tractability and, as a consequence, have established themselves as general‐purpose models for time series data. In this paper, we provide an overview of ways to use penalized splines to allow for flexible nonparametric inference within state‐switching models, and provide a critical discussion of the use of corresponding classes of models. The methods are illustrated using animal acceleration data and energy price data.