We study the electoral impact of protesting against the far right by investigating the demonstrations held during the 2002 French presidential elections against far-right candidate Jean-Marie Le Pen. Instrumenting rally attendance with rainfall while factoring in that some municipalities never...

Using a randomized controlled trial in a 2018 survey of a representative sample of the German population, we study whether providing information about the European Central Bank's (ECB) inflation record in comparison to its inflation target affects people's trust in the central bank. In the...

An experiment using a representative survey of the German population shows that letting respondents report a number rather than asking them to choose from a list of predefined ranges lowers the response rate for both perceived past and expected inflation and decreases (increases) reported past...

Using a randomized controlled trial, we study whether showing German respondents a graph plotting the European Central Bank's inflation target alongside inflation in the euro area from 1999 to 2017 affects respondents' trust in the ECB. The treatment has, on average, no significant effect on the...

This paper aims at discovering the decision rule the Governing Council of the ECB uses to set interest rates. We construct a Taylor rule for each member of the council and for the euro area as a whole, and aggregate the interest rates they produce using several classes of decision-making...

We study the relationship between major religious denominations and individuals' levels of education, using the World Values Survey. In a first step, running country-by-country regressions, we report first-time evidence that no single denomination has a universal effect on education. Each...

This paper tests whether corruption may act as an efficient grease for the wheels of an otherwise deficient institutional framework. We analyze the interaction between aggregate efficiency, corruption, and other dimensions of governance for a panel of 54 developed and developing countries. Using...

This paper assesses the relationship between institutions, output, and productivity, when official output is corrected for the size of the shadow economy. Our results confirm the usual positive impact of institutional quality on official output and total factor productivity, and its negative...