This paper provides a recent look at global smoking trends across population subgroups for a large sample of countries. Attention to international aspects has been scarce in the literature. The prevalence of various smoking control policies across different country groups is discussed. The level...

Using a large sample of nations, this paper examines the relation between corruption and the shadow economy, focusing especially on geographic spillovers. The results point to complementarity between corruption and the shadow economy. We find evidence of own contagion across nations in both...

This paper studies the effects of various forms of government decentralization on institutional quality across countries. Using corruption and the shadow economy to proxy for institutional quality, as well as three forms of government decentralization (i.e., virtual, physical, and fiscal), the...