The purpose of this paper is to investigate why politicians around the world have chosen to give up power to independent central banks, thereby reducing their ability to fine-tune the economy. A new data-set covering 132 countries, of which 86 countries had implemented such reforms, was...

Central banks have become more independent in many countries. A common rationale has been the existence of a credibility (or lack-of-trust) problem for monetary policy. This indicates a possible and until now unexplored link between social trust and central-bank independence. Our empirical...

A difference-in-difference approach was used to investigate whether central bank independence (CBI) reforms matter for inflation, based on a novel dataset including the possible occurrence of such reforms in 132 countries during the period 1980 to 2005. CBI-reforms are found to have contributed...

Data on central bank independence (CBI) and implementation dates of CBI-reforms were used to investigate the relationship between CBI and a possible trade-off between inflation variability and output variability. No such trade-off was found, but there might still be stabilisation gains from...

In this paper a count data regression model accounting for endogenous censoring with household specific censoring thresholds is presented. The presented modelling approach is utilized in an analysis of household choice of total number of nights to spend on monthly recreational trips. The...

The paper empirically studies whether pharmaceutical firms use advertising as a signal for high quality drugs. A multiple random effects count data hurdle model is specified and a simulated maximum likelihood estimation approach is developed and utilized in the empirical analysis.