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...

This paper analyses the development of the banking sector in twelve transition countries. Foreign banks have become major players in the financial system of these countries. Still, foreign bank presence and financial development in general vary considerably between these economies. Distance from...

In various empirical studies so-called tax ratios (tax revenues expressed as a ratio of some aggregate tax base) are employed as approximations for tax burdens. The most difficult problem in calculating tax ratios is the way in which personal income tax revenues are attributed to labor and...

This paper reviews empirical evidence for the United States on the impact of the public capital stock on productivity. On econometric grounds it is argued that most previous research is flawed. If the well-known model of Aschauer is estimated in first differences - which is necessary as the...

This paper reviews empirical research on the impact of government capital spending on economic growth. The pros and cons of five different ways to model the relationship between public investment and economic growth are reviewed, while some estimation results are presented for illustrative...

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...

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...

We argue that central bank independence (CBI) is a latent variable of which the various existing quantifications are imperfect indicators. We show how factor analysis techniques can be employed to assess the quality of the various indicators, and how an optimal weighting of the indicators can be...

Hausmann, Pritchett, and Rodrik (2005) found that a political regime change increases the probability of an economic growth acceleration. When we tried to replicate their results we discovered that these authors were led astray by a datadescription error in the Polity IV manual. When we correct...

IN HIS COMMENT ON THE ECONOMIC FREEDOM SURVEY ARTICLE we wrote with Susanna Lundström (De Haan et al. 2006), Lawson (2006) criticizes five elements of our article: 1.Our use of the term “zealots.†2.Our remarks on the role of government in the construction of the economic freedom...