The importance of good governance for the health of populations has hardly been researched even though major donors and international financial institutions make their aid and loans increasingly conditional upon reforms that ensure 'good governance'. We analyse the role of governance in...

Most recent cross-country studies on election-motivated fiscal policy assume that the data can be pooled. As various tests suggest that our data for some 70 democratic countries for the period 1970--2007 cannot be pooled, we use the Pooled Mean Group (PMG) estimator to test whether Political...

We examine the effect of elections and government ideology on public funding to the agricultural sector using a panel model for more than 70 democratic countries from 1975-2009. We find that support for agriculture increases prior to elections, and that right-wing governments redistribute more...

Using data for more than 200 banks from 21 OECD countries for the period 2002–2008, we examine the impact of bank regulation and supervision on banking risk using quantile regressions. In contrast to most previous research, we find that banking regulation and supervision has an effect on the...

Using 59 studies, we perform a meta-regression analysis of studies examining the relationship between inflation and central bank independence (CBI). The studies considered are very different with respect to the CBI indicator used, the sample of countries and time periods covered, model...

Using 59 studies, we perform a meta regression analysis of studies examining the relationship between inflation and central bank independence (CBI). There is a negative and significant relation between inflation and CBI in OECD countries, although the results are sensitive to the indicator used...