This paper studies the factors driving changes in judicial independence (JI) as incorporated in constitutions. Two indicators of constitutionally safeguarded JI are constructed. Variations in these indicators are identified based on changes in the constitutions of as many as 100 countries that...

In recent decades economists have turned their attention to data that asks people how happy or satisfied they are with their lives. Much of the early research concluded that the role of income in determining well-being was limited, and that only income relative to others was related to...

This article gives a general overview of the main issues covered in the literature on the new economy. The latter is defined as an economy in which the emergence of a new production sector, that of the Information and Communications Technologies (ICT), affects the growth rate of productivity in...

We investigate the cost of capital in a model with an agency conflict between inside managers and outside shareholders. Inside ownership reflects the classic tradeoff between incentives and risk diversification, and the severity of agency costs depends on a parameter representing investor...

Traditionally, financial systems have been bank-based or market-based. The efficiency properties of these systems are compared in various dimensions. These include risk sharing, information provision, funding new industries, corporate governance, and law, finance and politics. Both systems have...

We study the economic sources of stock-bond return comovement and its time variation using a dynamic factor model. We identify the economic factors employing structural and non-structural vector autoregressive models for economic state variables such as interest rates, (expected) inflation,...

Consisting of teams working with firm level data, the International Study Group on Exports and Productivity has used comparable micro level panel data for 14 countries and a set of identically specified empirical models to investigate the relationship between exports and productivity. The...

The ratio of global trade to GDP declined by nearly 30 percent during the global recession of 2008-2009. This large drop in international trade has generated significant attention and concern. Did the decline simply reflect the severity of the recession for traded goods industries? Or...