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 examine the effect of elections and government ideology on public funding to the agricultural sector using a panel model for more than 70 democratic countries from 1975-2009. We find that support for agriculture increases prior to elections, and that right-wing governments redistribute more...

Using data for more than 200 banks from 21 OECD countries for the period 2002–2008, we examine the impact of bank regulation and supervision on banking risk using quantile regressions. In contrast to most previous research, we find that banking regulation and supervision has an effect on the...

In this paper we confirm the hypothesis that central bank independence reforms reduce the likelihood that a central bank governor will be replaced. However, the strength of this effect depends on the rule of law and the degree of political polarization.

It has been argued that central bank independence (CBI) may not only be beneficial for reaching the objective of price stability, but also for maintaining financial stability. Greater independence from external pressure implies that central banks are less politically constrained in acting to...

We examine the effect of political 'institutions' on economic growth volatility, using data from more than 100 countries over the period 1960 to 2005, taking into account various control variables as suggested in previous studies. Our indicator of volatility is the relative standard deviation of...

We test the hypothesis that governments facing popular protest are more likely to use fiscal policy for re-election purposes, employing data of 65 democratic countries–both developed and developing–over the period 1975–2005. Using the number of anti-government demonstrations and general...

We analyze whether the political system and its stability are related to cross-country differences in health. We apply factor analysis on various national health indicators for a large sample of countries over the period 2000-2005 and use the outcomes of the factor analysis to construct two new...