The aim of this paper is to assess the importance of economic institutions, measured by an index built from the E.B.R.D. (European Bank for Reconstruction and Development) indicators, for the pattern of economic growth. Though it focuses on a particular set of transition economies, it is also...

The article summarizes the key results of researches in the field of early warning systems for financial crises, conducted by the Center for Macroeconomic Analysis and Short-Term Forecasting (CMASF) since 2005. The proposed early warning system consists of three major blocks: the leading...

We estimate the quantitative importance of labour market institutions for equilibrium unemployment in OECD. The empirical equation for unemployment is based on the solution of a dynamic macroeconomic model where wages and prices are jointly determined with unemployment. Compared to existing...

Structural economic models allow one to analyze counterfactuals when economic systems change and to evaluate the well-being of economic agents. A key element in such analysis is the ability to identify the primitive functions and distributions of the economic models that are employed to describe...

The paper exploits the distributional dynamics and structural changes in the endogenous distribution of economic freedom across countries over time by utilizing the Rosenblatt–Parzen Kernel density estimator compared to the original distribution based on the methodology proposed by the...

We claim that a sequential mechanism linking history to development exists: first, history defines the quality of social capital; then, social capital determines the level of corruption; finally, corruption affects economic performance. We test this hypothesis on a dataset of Italian provinces,...

We study the connection between economic performance and the quality of government institutions for the sample of 103 Italian NUTS3 regions, including new measures of institutional quality calculated using data on the provision of four areas of public service: health, educational...

This paper shows that Tabellini’s recent claim to have provided evidence that culture has a causal effect on economic development is unjustified. Tabellini’s claim is based on an instrumental variables analysis in which two instruments are used to identify the supposed causal effect. One of...

We study the connection between economic performance and the quality of government institutions for the sample of 103 Italian NUTS3 regions, including new measures of institutional quality calculated using data on the provision of four areas of public service: health, educational...