We assess whether the voting records of central bank boards are informative about future monetary policy using data on five inflation targeting countries (the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, Sweden and the United Kingdom). We find that in all countries the voting records, namely the difference...

We examine the effect of generalized trust on long-term economic growth. Unlike in previous studies, we use Bayesian model averaging to deal rigorously with model uncertainty and attendant omitted variable bias. In addition, we address endogeneity and assess whether the effect of trust on growth...

In this paper, we examine whether pre-crisis leading indicators help explain pressures on the exchange rate (and its volatility) during the global financial crisis. We use a unique data set that covers 149 countries and 58 indicators, and estimation techniques that are robust to model...

We examine time-varying stock market comovements in Central Europe employing the asymmetric dynamic conditional correlation multivariate GARCH model. Using daily data from 2001 to 2011, we find that the correlations among stock markets in Central Europe and between Central Europe vis-a-vis the...

This paper examines the relationship between capital and liquidity creation. This issue is of interest to determine the potential impact of tighter capital requirements such as those involved in Basel III reforms on liquidity creation. We perform Granger-causality tests in a dynamic GMM panel...

We examine the international stock market comovements between Western Europe vis-àvis Central (the Czech Republic, Hungary and Poland) and South Eastern Europe (Croatia, Macedonia and Serbia) using multivariate GARCH models in 2006-2011. Comparing these two groups, we find that the degree of...

We analyze 1334 estimates from 67 studies that examine the effect of financial development on economic growth. Taken together, the studies imply a positive and statistically significant effect, but individual estimates vary a lot. We find that both research design and heterogeneity in the...

We examine the effect of natural resource abundance on economic performance during the 1996-2011 period in the 15 independent countries that formerly comprised the Soviet Union. These countries were a largely homogeneous group with respect to institutional development, liberalization and...

An important question in development studies is how abundance of natural resources affects long-term economic growth. No consensus answer, however, has yet emerged, with approximately 40% of empirical papers finding a negative effect, 40% finding no effect, and 20% finding a positive effect....

We examine how the transparency of the European Central Bank´s monetary policy affects the amount of trust that the citizens of the European Union have in this institution. We use nearly half a million individual responses from the European Commission´s Eurobarometer survey from 2000-2011 and...