reforms. Democracy may be conducive to reform, as politicians embrace growth-enhancing reforms to win elections. On the other … hand, authoritarian regimes may not worry as much about public opinion and could undertake reforms that are painful in the … short run but bring long-term benefits. We test these alternative hypotheses, using data on regulatory reforms from the …

Simplifying entry regulation has been a popular reform since the publication of Djankov and others (2002). The … inclusion of business entry indicators in the World Bank's Doing Business project has led to an acceleration in reform: in 2003 …-08, 193 reforms took place in 116 countries. A large academic literature has followed: 201 academic articles have used the …

relationship to be causal. The paper also documents that reform chatter is followed by actual reforms, suggesting that democracies …This paper explores the dynamics of media chatter about economic reforms using text analysis from about a billion … newspaper articles in 28 languages. The paper shows that the intensity of reform chatter increases during economic downturns …