It is often maintained that democracy is a luxury which comes at a price in terms of subsequent slower increases in national living standards. However, various recent cross-section studies on economic growth have found evidence that lack of civil and political liberties is negatively correlated...

Often it is maintained that economic freedom may further high levels of economic growth. Using various measures of economic freedom constructed by G. W. Scully and D. J. Slottje (1991), the robustness of this relationship is examined. Both direct and indirect effects of lack of liberties are...

Over the last two decades, communication has become an increasingly important aspect of monetary policy. These real-world developments have spawned a huge new scholarly literature on central bank communication —mostly empirical, and almost all of it written in this decade. We survey this...

Does the general public know what central banks do? Is this kind of knowledge relevant? Using a survey of Dutch households, we investigate these questions for the case of the European Central Bank (ECB). Our findings suggest that knowledge on the ECB’s objectives is far from perfect. Both a...

We argue that the finding of Hausmann et al. (2005) that a political regime change increases the probability of an economic growth acceleration is wrong and the result of an error in their database. When we correct for this error and stick to the definition of regime change of Hausmann et al.,...