We test whether political instability affects central bank independence in developing countries. Both a legal measure and the turnover tate of central bank governors are used as proxies for central bank independence and the frequency of government transfers is used to proxy political...

We investigate to what extent the destination of exports and export composition affect the export performance of euro area countries, using a dataset on exports from euro area countries to their top 20 trade partners for the period 1980-2010. Our analysis shows that European integration has not...

This note presents new estimates of a probit model for the debt rescheduling, using a sample of 65 countries over the period 1984-93. Apart from economic variables, a whole range of indicators for political instability are included in the model as explanatory variables. It turns out, that none...

Using various indicators for economic freedom, it is shown that increases in economic freedom are robustly related to economic growth. This conclusion holds even if the impact of outlying observations is taken into account. The level of economic freedom is not related to growth.

If output gaps in a currency union are not sufficiently coherent, the common monetary policy will not be optimal for all countries or regions in the union. It is common practice to measure coherence of output gaps by a correlation coefficient. We propose new measures of output gap coherence,...

Most recent cross-country studies on election-motivated fiscal policy assume that the data can be pooled. As various tests suggest that our data for some 70 democratic countries for the period 1970--2007 cannot be pooled, we use the Pooled Mean Group (PMG) estimator to test whether Political...

We analyze how budgetary institutions affect government budget deficits in member states of the European Union during 1984-2003 employing new indicators provided by Hallerberg et al. (2009). Using panel fixed effects models, we examine whether the impact of budgetary institutions on budget...

We test Uncovered Interest Parity (UIP) using LIBOR interest rates for a wide range of maturities. In contrast to other markets, LIBOR markets have minimal frictions which could lead to rejecting UIP. Using panel unit root test suggested by Palm, Smeekes, and Urbain (2010) and cointegration...

We analyze whether households' savings behaviour was affected by adverse experiences during the crisis and knowledge about banking supervision. Using a survey among Dutch households, we find that both factors have affected the allocation of savings. Individuals whose bank went bankrupt or...

The relationship between government debt and the maturity of government debt is analysed for eight OECD countries. It is found that the negative relationship between debt and effective maturity as reported by Missale and Blanchard (1994) for Ireland and Italy can also be found for some other...