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This paper proposes an original formal framework to analyze institutional evolution. Institutions have formal (F) and informal (N) aspects that may evolve at different paces, although eventually converging towards each other through an dynamic interactive process. N evolves with capital accumulation, as in learning by doing, and F is optimally chosen by the government who maximizes output given the social and political costs of changing F. As transaction-cost-reducing mechanisms, F and N together define the production technology and affect the income level. As consistent with the evidence, calibrations of the model reveal that optimum F exhibits a punctuated equilibra.

This paper investigates macroeconomic effects of fiscal decentralization, which has been a neglected area of research. Panel evidence for 16 countries over 1980-1998 indicates that expenditure and revenue decentralization reduce budget deficits. A principal finding is that the fiscal disciplining effect of fiscal decentralization increases with population size. Interestingly, absence of local elections is associated with greater effectiveness of fiscal decentralization. The benefits of expenditure decentralization decrease with ethnolinguistic fractionalization and quality of governance. [Copyright Elsevier B.V.]

This article investigates the relationship between budget deficits and inflation with the view that the nature of this relationship depends on the characteristics of monetary and financial institutions. The main hypothesis is that budget deficits are especially inflationary when both the central bank is not independent and the financial market is not developed enough to contain inflationary expectations. The empirical analysis using a panel data that comprises 54 developed and less developed countries, with one to two decades of observations for each, supports this hypothesis. The findings are also robust to subsets of the sample. (JEL E58, H62)

This article has two contributions. First, using the methodology of Neyapti and Dincer, it provides measures of legal quality of bank regulation and supervision (RS) for a new set of developed and less‐developed countries. Second, it investigates the determinants of RS in view of the hypothesis that the existing institutional environment matters for the quality of formal institutions such as banking laws. The empirical evidence in this article demonstrates that past financial crises and prevailing levels of both financial market development and foreign direct investment inflows affect RS beyond and above the effects of other potential factors, such as macroeconomic performance and good governance. Evidence from transition economies also supports these findings. (JEL E44, G2, K29, O1)

This article extends the model of Von Hagen and Harden that analyzed the impact of fiscal discipline on budgetary outcomes. We modify the model by adding monetary discipline to interact with fiscal discipline in order to analyze the effects of both on budgetary outcomes. The model predicts that while both inflation and budget deficits are negatively associated with fiscal discipline, they may be positively associated with monetary discipline, proxied by central bank independence. This result obtains due to optimizing agents internalizing the burden of spending: inflation. Although not conclusive due to data limitations, empirical findings also support these predictions. (JEL D73, E58, H61, H72)