Using cross-country data, this paper estimates the impact of the 2007 financial shock on countries' macroeconomic developments conditional on national financial regulations before the crisis. For this purpose, the financial reform index developed by Abiad et al. (A New Database of Financial...

We examine the effect of generalized trust on long-term economic growth. Unlike in previous studies, we use Bayesian model averaging to deal rigorously with model uncertainty and attendant omitted variable bias. In addition, we address endogeneity and assess whether the effect of trust on growth...

The debate over whether political democracy is the least bad regime, as Churchill once said, remains unresolved because history has been ignored or misread, and because recent statistical studies have not chosen the right tests. Using too little historical information, and mistaking formal...

The work of Levine and Renelt (1992) and Sala-i-Martin (1997a, b) which attempted to test the robustness of various determinants of growth rates of per capita GDP among countries using two variants of Edward Leamerâ??s extreme-bounds analysis is reexamined. In a realistic Monte Carlo experiment...