The importance of good governance for the health of populations has hardly been researched even though major donors and international financial institutions make their aid and loans increasingly conditional upon reforms that ensure 'good governance'. We analyse the role of governance in...

Using data for more than 200 banks from 21 OECD countries for the period 2002 to 2008, we examine the impact of bank regulation and supervision on banking risk using quantile regressions. In contrast to most previous research, we find that banking regulation and supervision has an effect on the...

Most recent cross-country studies on election-motivated fiscal policy assume that the data can be pooled. As various tests suggest that our data for some 70 democratic countries for the period 1970--2007 cannot be pooled, we use the Pooled Mean Group (PMG) estimator to test whether Political...