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...

This paper studies the impact of social trust and formal legal and institutional determinants of capital accumulation in a panel of countries. It reports that formal determinants and trust interact, and that the two are substitutes. Specifically, the marginal impact of formal legal institutions...

This article studies the connection between political instability and the sustainability of an exchange rate regime. A model based on the credibility of monetary policy shows that political unrest should be correlated with the adoption of flexible exchange rates. That intuition is tested using...

This paper studies labor market discriminations as an agency problem. It sets up a principal-agent model of a firm, where the manager is a taste discriminator and has to make unobservable hiring decisions that determine the shareholder’s profits because workers differ in skills. The paper...

This paper studies monetary policy in the presence of asymmetric wage indexation. It is found that monetary authorities do not react to small output shocks and that their reaction to large shocks is asymmetric, insofar as they absorb positive shocks more than negative ones. As a consequence,...

This paper investigates the motive of geographic risk diversification in the lending activity for bank mergers in the EU on a sample of large banking groups. Geographic diversification should allow banks to reduce their risk. We observe that the loan portfolios of European banks are home-biased....

This note studies the volatility of the policy chosen by a committee whose members’ preferences are volatile, due to common and individual preferences shocks. It is shown that majority voting mitigates the latter but not the former. The volatility of the policy is smaller the smaller the...

We study optimal monetary policy in the presence of asymmetric wage indexation. We find that the monetary authorities do not react to small output shocks and that their reaction to large shocks is asymmetric, insofar as they absorb positive shocks more than negative ones. As a consequence, we...

This paper tests whether corruption can be viewed as an efficient grease in the wheels of an otherwise deficient institutional framework. It does so by analyzing the interaction between aggregate efficiency, corruption, and other dimensions of governance for a panel of 54 countries both...

This paper returns to one of the early questions of the literature on social trust, whether trust affects total factor productivity (TFP). Using both development and growth accounting, we find strong evidence of a causal effect of trust on the level and growth of TFP. Using a three-stage...