Recent literature proposes many variables as significant determinants of pollution. This paper gives an overview of this literature and asks which of these factors have an empirically robust impact on water and air pollution, i.e. do not depend upon the conditioning information set. For this, we...

There are many stories of democracy but little consensus over which variables robustly determine its emergence and survival. We apply extreme bounds analysis to test the robustness of 59 factors proposed in the literature, evaluating over 3 million regressions. The most robust determinants of...

Deindustrialisation, stagnant real incomes of production workers and increasing inequality are latter-day features of many economies. It's common to assume that such developments pressure policy-makers to relax environmental standards. However, when heavily polluting industries become less...

This paper examines whether a country's economic reforms are affected by reforms adopted by other countries. A simple model of economic reforms is developed to motivate the econometric work. Unsurprisingly, the model predicts that reforms are more likely when factors of production are...

While there is ample evidence how central bank communication and interest rate decisions are perceived by financial markets, insights regarding the response of the public is lacking. Media is known to be an important transmitter of news to the public. Based on articles in the Financial Times...

This paper tests the existence of strategic information complementarities as a source of sectoral comovement. A theoretical model derived in Veldkamp and Wolfers (2007) explains sectoral comovement by the assumption that firms rely too much on aggregate information to make output decisions. We...

This paper examines how robust economic, political, and demographic variables are related to water and air pollution. Employing Bayesian Averaging of Classical Estimates (BACE) for a cross section of up to 74 countries, 33 variables and 3 proxies for air and water pollution over a period from...

This paper investigates how inflation expectations evolve. In particular, we analyze the time-varying nature of the propensity to update expectations and its potential determinants. For this purpose we set up a flexible econometric model that tracks the formation of inflation expectations of...

Using the microdata of the Michigan Survey of Consumers, we evaluate whether U.S. consumers form macroeconomic expectations consistent with different economic concepts. We check whether their expectations are in line with the Phillips Curve, the Taylor Rule and the Income Fisher Equation. We...

In this paper we explore the degree of anchoring of consumers' long-run inflation expectations. If expectations are firmly anchored, short- and long-run expectations should show no comovement in response to transitory shocks. Utilizing the University of Michigan Survey of Consumer’s rotating...