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Almost all attempts to construct capital stock data base on some variant of the Perpetual Inventory Method. While various countries employ this method to construct suitable proxies of national capital stocks, the implementation and the underlying assumptions differ considerably, thereby rendering the results internationally incomparable. Only a few attempts to construct internationally comparable capital stock data have yet been undertaken in the scientific literature. In this paper we outline the idea of the Perpetual Inventory Method and deliver a survey of previous implementations of the method. Based on a critical assessment of these implementations we propose a unified approach and construct estimations of aggregate capital stocks for the 1970 to 2010 period for 103 countries.

Even after four decades of research it remains unclear, whether presidential popularity depends on the state of the economy. While about half of all studies for the United States find a significant effect of unemployment and inflation on pr esidential popularity, the others do not. Additional economic issues have rarely been studied. In this survey article we study the likely causes for the inconclusive findings. While various factors have an influence on t he results, especially the choice of the sample period is of crucial importance. While in the very long run we find unemployment, inflation and the budget deficit to have a robust effect on presidential approval, this holds not true for shorter sub-periods. This result might indicate that the popularity function is instable over time. However, the findings might also be taken as an indication that the most often employed linear estimation approach is inadequate. Further research on these issues is necessary. JEL-Code: D720, H110.