The paper presents empirical findings regarding the economic policy consequences of constitutional arrangements, in three different dimensions. First, the data are consistent with several theoretical predictions about the consequences of electoral rules and forms of government for fiscal policy...

Assessing exchange rate misalignment is not an easy task. With reference to the debate on the value of China's currency, the renminbi (RMB), this article highlights a few challenges in properly assessing the extent of currency misalignment. The results derived from the fundamental equilibrium...

We study the differences of currency misalignment estimates obtained from alternative datasets derived from two International Comparison Program (ICP) surveys. A decomposition exercise reveals that the year 2005 misalignment estimates are substantially affected by the ICP price revision....

The paper combines insights from the recent research programs on constitutions and economic policy, and on history, institutions and growth. Drawing on cross-sectional as well as panel data, it presents new empirical results showing that the form of democracy (rather than democracy vs....

This paper argues that skill formation is a life-cycle process and develops the implications of this insight for Scottish social policy. Families are major producers of skills, and a successful policy needs to promote effective families and to supplement failing ones. We present evidence that...

We estimate the effect of political regime transitions on growth with semi-parametric methods, combining difference in differences with matching, that have not been used in macroeconomic settings. Our semi-parametric estimates suggest that previous parametric estimates may have seriously...

Is corruption systematically related to electoral rules? A number of studies have tried to uncover economic and social determinants of corruption but, as far as we know, nobody has yet empirically investigated how electoral systems ináuence corruption. We try to address this lacuna in the...

Using an uneven panel of 135 countries from 1995 to 2014, we investigate the link between interest rates and private saving, and focus on whether the interest rate effect is dominated by the income (i.e., negative) or the substitution (i.e., positive) effect. With the baseline estimation, we...

Using data from more than 100 economies for the period of 1975 to 2005, we conduct an extensive empirical analysis of the determinants of international reserve holdings. Four groups of determinants, namely, traditional macro variables, financial variables, institutional variables, and dummy...