Political Economy Research

Overview

Almost all of my work sits at the intersection of political science and economics – political economy. Walker (2005) contained a series of papers spanning political methodology, international finance, and political institutions. Skip Krueger, I, and co-authors published a series of papers conceptualizing default risk as a multiple rater problem including the papers by Krueger and Walker (2010), Krueger, Hawkins, and Walker (2010), Walker and Krueger (2009), and Krueger and Walker (2008). Krueger, Walker, and Bernick (2011) examines how local governments provide services in a political economy framework.

Thompson and Walker (2014) and Pierson, Thompson, and Walker (2016) examine property taxes and unique [and dysfunctional] features of Oregon’s tax system.

Data & Code

All research materials, including data and replication code, are available on my GitHub.

I am committed to computational reproducibility and open science. Most projects include:

  • Documented R/Python code
  • Data (when not restricted)
  • Quarto/RMarkdown analysis notebooks
  • Instructions for replication

References

Krueger, Skip, Christopher V. Hawkins, and Robert W. Walker. 2010. “The Cost of Boosterism: Economic Development, Growth Management, and Municipal Bond Ratings.” Municipal Finance Journal 31 (2): 51–75.
Krueger, Skip, and Robert W. Walker. 2008. “Divided Government, Political Turnover, and State Bond Ratings.” Public Finance Review 36 (3): 259–86.
———. 2010. “Management Practices and State Bond Ratings.” Public Budgeting & Finance 30 (4): 47–70.
Krueger, Skip, Robert W. Walker, and Ethan Bernick. 2011. “The Intergovernmental Context of Alternative Service Delivery Choices.” Publius: The Journal of Federalism 41 (4): 686–708.
Pierson, Kawika, Fred Thompson, and Robert W. Walker. 2016. “Property Tax Fairness in Multnomah County, Oregon.” California Journal of Politics and Policy 8 (2).
Thompson, Fred, and Robert W. Walker. 2014. “A Tale of Two Cities: Learning from Oregon’s Property Tax Administration.” State Tax Notes, 273–384.
Walker, Robert W. 2005. “Multiple Choice: Policy Substitution and Complementarity with Heterogeneity.” PhD thesis, University of Rochester.
Walker, Robert W., and Skip Krueger. 2009. “Now You See It, Now You Don’t: The Mysterious Case of the Vanishing Split Bond Rating in States.” Public Budgeting & Finance 29 (1): 84–101.