We provide a framework for inference in dynamic equilibrium models including financial market data at daily frequency, along with macro series at standard lower frequency. Our formulation of the macro-finance model in continuous-time conveniently accounts for the difference in observation...

We document that trust in public institutions—and particularly trust in banks, business and government—has declined over recent years. U.S. time series evidence suggests that this partly reflects the pro-cyclical nature of trust in institutions. Cross-country comparisons reveal a clear...

This paper employs a stylized New Keynesian DSGE model for a monetary union to analyze whether cyclical inflation differentials can be explained by cross-country differences concerning the characteristics of financial markets. Our results suggest that empirically plausible degrees of...

This research explores the origins of the distribution of time preference across regions. It advances the hypothesis, and establishes empirically that geographical variations in the natural return to agricultural investment have had a persistent effect on the distribution of time preference...

This work shows the asymmetric effect of the reduction in transportation costs across different sectors in the process of the Great Divergence. Specifically, the analysis indicates that reductions in transportation costs of industrial goods enhance convergence of the growth rates of trading...

Over 10 years ago, Feld and Voigt (2003) introduced the first indicator for objectively meas-uring the actual independence of the judiciary and demonstrated its utility in a large cross-section of countries. The indicator has been widely used, but also criticized. This paper pre-sents more...

Does the concept of General Purpose Technologies help explain periods of faster and slower productivity advance in economies? The paper develops a new comparative data set on the usage of electricity in the manufacturing sectors of the USA, Britain, France, Germany and Japan and proceeds to...

In this paper, we apply a convex hull approach to counterfactual analysis of trade openness and growth. The experiments we choose evaluate the importance of trade openness for growth across African countries. Specifically, we ask the question “what would happen if African countries were more...

Investment in network infrastructure can boost long-term economic growth in OECD countries. Moreover, infrastructure investment can have a positive effect on growth that goes beyond the effect of the capital stock because of economies of scale, the existence of network externalities competition...

We argue that in modelling cross-country growth models one should first identify so-called outlying observations. For the data set of Sala-i-Martin, we use the least median of squares (LMS) estimator to identify outliers. As LMS is not suited for inference, we then use reweighted least squares...