We study whether national leaders’ foreign education influences their foreign policy, measured by voting behavior at the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA). We hypothesize that “affinity” - pre-existing or developed while studying abroad - makes leaders with foreign education more...

We examine whether economic and military competence of political leaders affect their duration in office. We introduce leader heterogeneity in the selectorate theory of Bueno de Mesquita et al. (2003) and derive the hypothesis that in the presence of a revolutionary threat, economic competence...

We examine the impact of leadership change after a coup d'etat on economic growth. We consider successful coup attempts as our treatment group and use failed coup attempts as controls to condition on political instability. To take account of selection bias, we control for the determinants of...

To investigate the relation between trust and formal institutions, we analyze bilateral trade patterns in a sample of 16 European countries between 1996-2009. Trust in trading partners has a significant positive effect on bilateral trade. However, our results suggest that trust and formal...

This paper introduces a comprehensive database of informal economic activity. The database focuses on measures that have strong cross-country and over time coverage: it includes both model-based and survey-based measures of informality and covers more than 160 economies for the period 1990-2018....

We study the degree of synchronization between formal- and informal-economy business cycles. Using a comprehensive database of informal activity that covers a wide range of informality measures from almost 160 countries over the 1990-2018 period, we report two major results. First, fluctuations...

The widening of fiscal deficits during democratic elections is well established. We examine a broader set of fiscal outcomes around elections for a large set of emerging and developing economies (EMDEs), probe for differences between democracies and non-democracies, and estimate the degree to...

Following earlier studies on accelerations of output and the capital stock, we propose an adjusted method to identify accelerations in investment that ensures that the identified episodes are characterized by sustained increases in per capita investment growth to a relatively high rate. We...

This paper presents a comprehensive examination of the determination and evolution of inflation expectations, with a focus on emerging market and developing economies (EMDEs). The results suggest that long-term inflation expectations in EMDEs are not as well anchored as those in advanced...