We identify a set of "rules of thumb" that characterise economic, financial and structural conditions preceding the onset of banking and currency crises in 36 advanced economies over 1970-2010. We use the Classification and Regression Tree methodology (CART) and its Random Forest (RF) extension,...

In this paper, we track fiscal authority behaviour in the ten new EU member states (NSM) in the period which immediately preceded their EU accession. We first present basic stylized facts about public budgets of those countries. The paper then analyses reasons which led to periods of fiscal...

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...