In a recent paper, we studied economic growth and inflation at different levels of government and external debt. The public discussion of our empirical strategy and results has been somewhat muddled. Here, we attempt to clarify matters, particularly with respect sample coverage (our evidence...

This paper compares more direct measures of the institutional environment with both the instability proxies used by Barro (1991) and the Gastil indices, by comparing their effects both on growth and private investment. The results provide substantial support for the position that the...

Using annual data for Colombia over the last 30 years, we test competing theories that explain macroeconomic fluctuations: the neoclassical synthesis, which posits that in the presence of temporary price rigidity, an unanticipated monetary expansion produces output gains that erode over time...

Periods of high indebtedness have historically been associated with a rising incidence of default or restructuring of public and private debts. Sometimes the debt restructuring is subtle and takes the form of, “financial repression.” In the heavily regulated financial markets of the Bretton...

This paper makes two contributions to the literature. First, it introduces a new, easily accessed and objective measure of the enforceability of contracts and the security of property rights. Second, it uses this measure to provide additional and more direct evidence about the importance of...

In our recent paper, (Reinhart and Reinhart, 2010) we examine the behavior of real GDP (levels and growth rates), unemployment, inflation, bank credit, and real estate prices in a twenty one-year window surrounding selected adverse global and country-specific shocks or events. In this note, we...

We reconstruct a dataset used by Persson and Tabellini (AER, 1994) to test the robustness of their finding that inequality reduces income growth, but only in democracies. We find that their result is highly sensitive to the use of data sources on both democracy and inequality. When we substitute...