This study investigates the relationship between financial development and the size of the informal economy. We build a model in which an exogenous variation in the size of the informal sector creates two effects on financial development. Specifically, informal sector harms financial development...

This study investigates the relationship between financial development and the size of the informal economy. We build a model in which an exogenous variation in the size of the informal sector creates two effects on financial development. Specifically, informal sector harms financial development...

Austerity is a concept that is often used in the public debate. It refers to fiscal policy measures that reduce government spending and raise taxes for the purposes of closing a government budget deficit. This paper analyzes the concept in the context of the current European economic crisis and...

The aim of the paper is to shed light on the question of why a country decides to set up a Sovereign Wealth Fund (SWF). Despite the recent financial crisis, 43 SWFs have been created between 2005 and 2014. In particular, we test if the emergence of these new recent funds can be explained by the...

SWFs manage large financial assets of sovereign states across borders. The structure and objectives of these funds are poorly understood. Drawing conclusions about the intentions of these funds only based on their level of transparency, however, can be misleading. Transparency or lack thereof is...

How does policy affect innovation and the digital economy? We revisit how standard product market regulation affects innovation and develop a novel framework for thinking about digital regulation. Using new establishment-level micro-data across 12 countries between 1998 and 2012, this paper...

In this paper, we investigate the relationship between the level of democracy and fiscal-policy response to the economic crisis induced by the COVID-19 pandemic. We use a novel cross-country dataset of fiscal-policy responses with time variation. Our results suggest that more democratic...

This study investigates the relationship between financial development and the size of the informal economy. We build a model in which an exogenous variation in the size of the informal sector creates two effects on financial development. Specifically, informal sector harms financial development...

One of the foundational assumptions of patent law is that imbuing inventions with intellectual property rights (IPR) is necessary to bring forth innovation. We test this foundational assumption by examining the impact of IPR on commercialization of university research. Using the full set of US...

In the paper it is questioned whether effective state social policy provides happiness and social progress. For this purpose selected correlations between Human Development Index (HDI), share of public social expenditures in GDP, the Happy Planet Index (HPI), GDP per capita, and Government...