An important question in development studies is how abundance of natural resources affects long-term economic growth. No consensus answer, however, has yet emerged, with approximately 40% of empirical papers finding a negative effect, 40% finding no effect, and 20% finding a positive effect....

We examine how the transparency of the European Central Bankś monetary policy affects the amount of trust that the citizens of the European Union have in this institution. We use nearly half a million individual responses from the European Commissionś Eurobarometer survey from 2000-2011 and...

We analyze 1334 estimates from 67 studies that examine the effect of financial development on economic growth. Taken together, the studies imply a positive and statistically significant effect, but individual estimates vary a lot. We find that both research design and heterogeneity in the...

In this paper, we examine whether pre-crisis leading indicators help explain pressures on the exchange rate (and its volatility) during the global financial crisis. We use a unique data set that covers 149 countries and 58 indicators, and estimation techniques that are robust to model...

We examine the effect of natural resource abundance on economic performance during the 1996-2011 period in the 15 independent countries that formerly comprised the Soviet Union. These countries were a largely homogeneous group with respect to institutional development, liberalization and...

We examine whether there is contagion from the U.S. stock market to six Central and Eastern European stock markets. We use a novel measure of contagion that examines whether volatility shocks in the U.S. stock market coupled with negative returns are followed by higher co-exceedance between U.S....

We propose a novel way to measure the rule of law intensity of exports at the goods level based on nearly 100 million disaggregated bilateral trade flows around the globe. We categorise goods into three groups: fragmented, primary and other. The theoretical literature on holdup problems...

We examine time-varying stock market comovements in Central Europe employing the asymmetric dynamic conditional correlation multivariate GARCH model. Using daily data from 2001 to 2011, we find that the correlations among stock markets in Central Europe and between Central Europe vis-a-vis the...

We examine the effect of generalized trust on long-term economic growth. Unlike in previous studies, we use Bayesian model averaging to deal rigorously with model uncertainty and attendant omitted variable bias. In addition, we address endogeneity and assess whether the effect of trust on growth...

This paper examines the relationship between capital and liquidity creation. This issue is of interest to determine the potential impact of tighter capital requirements such as those involved in Basel III reforms on liquidity creation. We perform Granger-causality tests in a dynamic GMM panel...