Using a conviction-based measure, we find that local (state-level) public corruption exerts a negative effect on the lending activity of US banks. Our baseline estimations show that the difference in public corruption between, e.g., Alabama, where corruption is high, and Minnesota, where...

This paper examines the impact of economic freedom on the cost of bank loans using a sample of 30,644 bank-loan observations in 50 US states over the period 1991–2018. We find that greater economic freedom has been consistently linked to lower loan spreads. Digging deeper into the components...

In this paper we examine the effects of the services provided by public infrastructure on the cost structure, private input demands, and productivity performance of twenty two-digit Greek manufacturing industries. The model of the paper is the dual cost function. Although the effects of public...

The aim of the present study is to assess the effect of public infrastructures on the cost structure of the Chilean economy, and thereby on productivity, differentiating between two key sequential periods. A derived aim is to establish to what extent infrastructure and non-infrastructure...

The rapid spread of COVID-19 across the globe primed a variety of non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs). Given these NPIs, whether the SIR parameters followed a Bayesian learning, a random walk pattern or other type of learning with evolving epidemiological data over time has implications for...