This article studies the connection between political instability and the sustainability of an exchange rate regime. A model based on the credibility of monetary policy shows that political unrest should be correlated with the adoption of flexible exchange rates. That intuition is tested using...

This paper relates the volatility of interest rates to the collective nature of monetary policymaking in monetary unions. Several decision rules are modelled, including hegemonic and democratic procedures, and also committees headed by a chairman. A ranking of decision rules in terms of the...

This paper tests whether corruption may be an efficient grease in the wheels of an otherwise deficient institutional framework. It analyzes the interaction between aggregate efficiency, corruption, and other dimensions of governance for a panel of 69 countries, both developed and developing....

This paper reports a negative relationship between the size of the shadow economy and generalized trust, in a sample of countries, both developed and developing. That relationship is robust to controlling for a large set of economic, policy, and institutional variables, to changing the estimate...

This note reconsiders the results obtained by Matsen and Røisland [Eur. J. Political Economy 21 (2005) 365–384] by dropping the simplifying assumption that the median of country-specific shocks is equal to their mean. Majority voting then increases the volatility of the chosen interest rate...

[fre] Inévitablement, les autorités monétaires des pays du sud méditerranéen vont être conduites à se poser la question des bénéfices qu’ils pourraient escompter d’un rattachement de leur monnaie domestique à l’euro. Si leur objectif prioritaire est de réduire l’inflation ou...

We test the relationship between governance and macroeconomic technical efficiency on a sample of 62 countries, both developed and developing. We do so by applying Battese and Coelli (1995)’s method at the aggregate level. We find that better governance, measured by six complementary indices...

This paper tests whether social trust affects total factor productivity (TFP). Using both development and growth accounting, we find strong evidence of a causal positive effect of social trust on the level and growth of TFP. We moreover observe that the effect of social trust on TFP runs through...

This paper aims at discovering the decision rule the Governing Council of the ECB uses to set interest rates. We construct a Taylor rule for each member of the council and for the euro area as a whole, and aggregate the interest rates they produce using several classes of decision-making...