In the wake of the global financial crisis, the European Parliament and Council Regulation 1060/2009 on Credit Rating Agencies has recently been published in the Official Journal of the European Union. With this Regulation the European Union takes a first step in addressing calls for a better...

This paper surveys recent evidence suggesting that market-oriented institutions and policies are strongly related to economic growth, focusing on studies using the economic freedom (EF) indicator of the Fraser Institute. This index is critically discussed. Also various serious shortcomings of...

This paper analyses which economic and political factors affect the chance that a country receives IMF credit or signs an agreement with the Fund. We use a panel model for 118 countries over the period 1971-2000. Our results, based on extreme bounds analysis, suggest that it is mostly economic...

The large and concentrated international activities of Dutch banks make the Netherlands particularly relevant for assessing the outward transmission of prudential policies. Analysis of the quarterly international claims of 25 Dutch banks in 63 countries over 2000-2013 indicates that Dutch banks...

This paper offers a meta-regression analysis of the literature on the drivers of financial development. Our results based on 1900 estimates suggest that institutional quality is positively correlated to both private sector credit and stock market capitalization (both as share of GDP). Domestic...

We examine whether fiscal rules constrain incumbent governments to use fiscal policy for re-election purposes. Using data on fiscal rules provided by the IMF for a sample of 77 (advanced and developing) countries over the 1984-2015 period, we find that after the Global Financial Crisis political...

This paper examines whether the increased use of macroprudential policies since the global financial crisis has affected the impact of (euro area and foreign) monetary policy on mortgage lending in Ireland and the Netherlands, which are both small open economies in the euro area. Using...

This paper examines the distributional implications of inflation on top income shares in 12 advanced economies using data over the period 1920-2016. We use Local Projections to analyze how top income shares respond to an inflation shock, and panel regressions in which all variables are defined...

We examine the impact of various dimensions of financial reform on the likelihood of systemic and non-systemic banking crises. Using new financial reform measures for a large sample of developing and developed countries for the period 1973 to 2002, our multivariate probit modeling results...