Proceedings of 9th International Business and Social Science Research Conference
6 - 8 January, 2014, Novotel World Trade Centre, Dubai, UAE, ISBN: 978-1-922069-41-2
The Economics of Voting: Credit (UN) Availability and
Voting Behavior
Alexis Antoniades and Carline Abi Saleh
We merge together two massive, micro-level, datasets to
study the impact of the state of the economy on voting
behavior. Specifically, we first compute the change in
lending approval rates by county using data on about 95%
of all mortgage applications in the US in the years 2004,
2007, and 2008. The data come from the Home Mortgage
Disclosure Act. Then, we compute the change in the share
of Democratic versus Republican votes between the
presidential elections of 2004 and 2008 for each county.
The data come from the Harvard Elections Data Archive.
By merging the two datasets, we then test if changes in
lending approval rates affected individuals' voting behavior.
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Dr. Alexis Antoniades, Assistant Professor, Economics, Georgetown University, School of Foreign
Service, Qatar, OD56, Email: aa658@georgetown.edu, Tel: + 974 4457-8288 (work),