We showed, in Berggren and Elinder (2012), that tolerance toward homosexuals is negatively and quite robustly related to economic growth. In a comment, Bornhoff and Lee (forthcoming) question this finding on model-specification grounds. By undertaking three changes, they purport to show that our...

Tolerance has the potential to affect both economic growth and wellbeing. It is therefore important to discern its determinants. We add to the literature by investigating whether the degree to which economic institutions and policies are market-oriented is related to different measures of...

Central banks have been made more independent in many countries. A common rationale has been the existence of a credibility (or lack-of-trust) problem for monetary policy. This indicates a possible and until now unexplored link between social trust and central-bank independence. Our empirical...

Bertil Ohlin is among the 71 individuals who were awarded the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel between 1969 and 2012. This ideological profile is part of the project called “The Ideological Migration of the Economics Laureates,” which fills the September...

Social trust has been identified as a catalyst for reforms. We take the literature further in two ways. First, we make a fine-grained analysis of mechanisms through which social trust enables liberalizing reforms – by strengthening the ability to overcome obstacles in the political process...

Both institutional quality and institutional stability have been argued to stimulate economic growth. But to improve institutional quality, a country must endure a period of institutional change, which implies at least a little and possibly a lot of institutional instability. We investigate the...

We measure and analyze discriminatory behavior against same-sex couples trying to rent an apartment in Portugal. This is the first correspondence field experiment investigating discrimination against this minority group in Portugal, adding to a literature using this method to ascertain...

We study the role of beauty in politics. For the first time, focus is put on differences in how women and men evaluate female and male candidates and how different candidate traits relate to success in real and hypothetical elections. We have collected 16,218 assessments by 2,772 respondents of...

While previous research examines how institutions matter for general life satisfaction and how specific institutions embodying equal rights for gay people matter for the life satisfaction of gays, we combine these two issues to analyze how the latter type of institutions relates to general life...

Government debt is high in most developed countries, and while it may reflect short-term attempts to kick-start the economy in times of crisis through fiscal stimulus, the longer-term consequences risk being detrimental to investment and growth. This makes it important to identify factors that...