De jure judicial independence (JI) is the single most important predictor of de facto JI. In this paper, we describe under what conditions countries are likely to include JI in their constitutions. We describe and analyze both their original choice in this regard as well as change over time...

This paper investigates whether the socioeconomic status of the head of government helps explain fiscal performance. Applying sociological research that attributes differences in people's ways of thinking and acting to their relative standing within society, we test whether the social status of...

We empirically examine how complexity of ECB communications affects financial market trading based on high-frequency data from European stock index futures trading. Our sam-ple covers ECB press conferences between January 2009 and December 2017, during which unconventional monetary policy...