This paper reviews empirical research on the impact of government capital spending on economic growth. The pros and cons of five different ways to model the relationship between public investment and economic growth are reviewed, while some estimation results are presented for illustrative...

This paper introduces new data on the term in office of central bank governors in 137 countries for 1970-2004. Our panel models show that the probability that a central bank governor is replaced in a particular year is positively related to the share of the term in office elapsed, political and...

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...

This paper uses a flexible functional form approach to account for the direct and indirect effects of public capital on the private sector. Furthermore we explicitly incorporate energy in the production function. We use the duality between production and cost functions and base our investigation...

We provide empirical evidence on the influence of income taxes on the choice of residence of taxpayers at the local government level. The fact that Swiss communities can independently set tax multipliers, thereby shifting the progressive tax scheme that is fixed at the cantonal (state) level,...

Grüner (2010) argues that the introduction of the European Monetary Union (EMU) led to lower wage growth and lower unemployment in participating countries. According to Grüner, monetary centralization increases the amplitude of national business cycles, which leads to higher unemployment risk....