Using a survey of a large group of first and final year students of different disciplines to study their belief in the existence of mutual benefits of market transactions, we observe significant differences between economics and business students on the one hand, and, on the other hand, students...

This paper studies the impact of social trust and formal legal institutions on capital accumulation in a panel of countries. The results not only confirm that both social trust and the quality of formal legal institutions have a positive impact on capital accumulation, but also show that they...

We investigate the impact of investment on growth in a sample of 85 developed and developing countries over 1984-2009, conditioning the marginal effect of investment on institutional quality. The panel structure of our dataset allows controlling for unobserved heterogeneity and dealing with the...

This paper investigates the role of a free press and the circulation of information on the capacity of a country to declare an exchange regime that differs from the regime it implements de facto. We report consistent evidence that greater press freedom and easier access to information result in...

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...

Studies of the impact of local political risk on foreign direct investment inflows overlook that worldwide FDI comes in waves. Using a simple model we show that the impact of political risk on FDI inflows is likely to be weaker, the larger the worldwide amount of FDI, which may question standard...

This paper assesses the relationship between institutions, output, and productivity when official output is corrected for the size of the shadow economy. Our results confirm the usual positive impact of institutional quality on official output and total factor productivity, and its negative...

We analyze how adding the shadow economy to official output figures affects estimated technical efficiency at the country level. We find that this only slightly affects the ranking of efficiency scores, but increases average efficiency in a sample of 87 to 97 countries, both developed and...