This paper studies the effect of the governance of modern central banks on the ratings assigned by the credit rating agencies Standard and Poor's and Moody's. Until recently, the rating process was not public. Even still, the factors or precise methodologies used by the agencies remain uncertain...

Credit rating agencies have been an important determinant of countries' cost of capital in the last couple of decades. This paper studies the effect of the governance of modern central banks on the ratings assigned by the credit rating agencies Standard and Poor's and Moody's. Until recently,...

Research on central bank independence (CBI) focuses overwhelmingly on domestic causes and consequences. We consider CBI in relation to global finance. A first step links government decisions to reform central bank legislation to a perceived need to attract capital in the form of foreign direct...

Developing countries have increasingly opened their economies to trade. Research about trade policy in developed countries focuses on a bottom-up process by identifying economic preferences of domestic groups. We know less about developing countries. We analyze how economic and political...

Estimating the mechanisms that connect explanatory variables with the explained variable, also known as "mediation analysis," is central to a variety of social-science fields, especially psychology, and increasingly to fields like epidemiology. Recent work on the statistical methodology behind...

Dropbox makes scholarly collaboration much easier because it allows scholars to share files across different computers. However, because the Dropbox directories have different pathnames for different users, sharing do-files can be complicated. In this article, I offer some tips on how to...