We discuss how the organization of society, the complexity of the economy, and its level of technological development influence the relationship between the institutions of democracy and economic growth; why the foundation of democracy and market institutions at the same time, in a society...

This paper develops a proxy measure of the inequality of influence on the basis of survey evidence from 2002 Business Environment and Enterprise Performance Survey (BEEPS) conducted among 6,500 firms in 27 transition countries. We refer to the resulting inequality as crony bias in the political...

Based on the Business Environment and Enterprise Performance Survey (BEEPS) of firms in transition countries, which unbundles corruption to measure different types of corrupt transactions and provide detailed information on the characteristics and performance of firms, we find that: i)...

In a model where cooperation is beneficial, but subject to cheating, and is supported by trigger strategy punishments in a repeated game, we explore the relationship between the nature of cooperation (size and composition of coalitions) and underlying inequality in the distribution of private...

In this discussion draft, linking research findings with concrete operational challenges, we review key issues in worldwide governance, and present recent empirical evidence. Focusing on defining and unbundling key governance components, such as rule of law, voice and accountability, corruption...

In recent years, wavelets have become widely used in physics, engineering, and mathematics. They have been used for signal processing, image processing, numerical computation, and data compression. Wavelets have not, however, been used very much in the fields of Economics, Econometrics, and...

We present several Markov chain Monte Carlo simulation methods that have been widely used in recent years in econometrics and statistics. Among these is the Gibbs sampler, which has been of particular interest to econometricians. Although the paper summarizes some of the relevant theoretical...

The essential idea of equilibrium search models of labour market behaviour is that wage policy matters. In contrast, the stylized neoclassical competitive model predicts that firms paying a wage above the competitive equilibrium will disappear; those offering less will attract no workers. The...

We have collected data on the one-year-ahead income expectations of members of American households in our Survey of Economic Expectations (SEE), a module of a national continuous telephone survey conducted at the University of Wisconsin. The income- expectations questions take this form: "What...

The authors examine the issue of lag-length selection in the context of a structural vector autoregression (VAR) and a vector error-correction model with long-run restrictions. First, they show that imposing long- run restrictions implies, in general, a moving-average (MA) component in the...