This paper examines whether a country's economic reforms are affected by reforms adopted by other countries. A simple model of economic reforms is developed to motivate the econometric work. Unsurprisingly, the model predicts that reforms are more likely when factors of production are...

There are many stories of democracy but little consensus over which variables robustly determine its emergence and survival. We apply extreme bounds analysis to test the robustness of 59 factors proposed in the literature, evaluating over 3 million regressions. The most robust determinants of...

This paper investigates how inflation expectations evolve. In particular, we analyze the time-varying nature of the propensity to update expectations and its potential determinants. For this purpose we set up a flexible econometric model that tracks the formation of inflation expectations of...

Using the microdata of the Michigan Survey of Consumers, we evaluate whether U.S. consumers form macroeconomic expectations consistent with different economic concepts. We check whether their expectations are in line with the Phillips Curve, the Taylor Rule and the Income Fisher Equation. We...

Using the microdata of the Michigan Survey of Consumers, we evaluate whether U.S. consumers form macroeconomic expectations consistent with different economic concepts, namely the Phillips curve, the Taylor rule and the Income Fisher equation. We observe that 50% of the surveyed population have...

There is a growing interest in studying the disagreement of economic agents. Most studies, however, focus on the disagreement regarding one specific variable, hereby neglecting that disagreement may be comoving with disagreement on other variables. In this paper we explore to which extent...