This article analyses financial markets' reaction to European Central Bank's (ECB) communication. We apply a novel indicator that quantifies the contents of the ECB's introductory statements and allows disentangling ECB statements on prices, the real and the monetary sector. We provide evidence...

The high rate of software piracy is a growing concern for software developers as well as businesses and governments. It is argued here that the piracy rate is influenced by expected benefits and costs to the pirates. A model is developed using a set of variables that may affect such benefits and...

Our aim is to disclose robust explanatory variables for health care expenditure (HCE) growth by introducing to this field of research a method that is especially well suited for situations of 'model uncertainty': the Extreme Bounds Analysis (EBA). We analyse data for 33 OECD countries over the...

Using various indicators for economic freedom, it is shown that increases in economic freedom are robustly related to economic growth. This conclusion holds even if the impact of outlying observations is taken into account. The level of economic freedom is not related to growth.