This paper reports a negative relationship between the size of the shadow economy and generalized trust, in a sample of countries, both developed and developing. That relationship is robust to controlling for a large set of economic, policy, and institutional variables, to changing the estimate...

We study optimal monetary policy in the presence of asymmetric wage indexation. We find that the monetary authorities do not react to small output shocks, and that their reaction to large shocks is asymmetric, insofar as they absorb positive shocks more than negative ones. As a consequence, we...

We test the relationship between governance and macroeconomic technical efficiency on a sample of 62 countries, both developed and developing. We do so by applying Battese and Coelli (1995)’s method at the aggregate level. We find that better governance, measured by six complementary indices...

This paper analyses the voting and abstention patterns in French departments in the 1992 referendum on the Maastricht treaty, in light of the potential impact of monetary union. We observe that departmental characteristics implying either greater benefits or lower costs from monetary union are...

Using a sample of 96 countries over the nineties, this paper examines the extent to which different dimensions of governance affect FDI inflows. It considers six aspects of governance. The results of a least-squares estimation suggest a positive relationship between institutional quality and...

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 tests whether social trust affects total factor productivity (TFP). Using both development and growth accounting, we find strong evidence of a causal positive effect of social trust on the level and growth of TFP. We moreover observe that the effect of social trust on TFP runs through...