To investigate how a fixed exchange rate affects monetary policy, this paper classifies countries as pegged or non-pegged and examines whether a pegged country must follow the interest rate changes in the base country. Despite recent research which hints that all countries, not just pegged countries, lack monetary freedom, the evidence shows that pegs follow base country interest rates more than non-pegs. This study uses actual behavior, not declared status, for regime classification; expands the sample including base currencies other than the dollar; examines the impact of capital controls, as well as other control variables; considers the time series properties of the data carefully; and uses cointegration and other levels-relationship analysis to provide additional insights.

We investigate the regulation of labor markets through employment, collective relations, and social security laws in 85 countries. We find that the political power of the left is associated with more stringent labor regulations and more generous social security systems, and that socialist, French, and Scandinavian legal origin countries have sharply higher levels of labor regulation than do common law countries. However, the effects of legal origins are larger, and explain more of the variation in regulations, than those of politics. Heavier regulation of labor is associated with lower labor force participation and higher unemployment, especially of the young. These results are most naturally consistent with legal theories, according to which countries have pervasive regulatory styles inherited from the transplantation of legal systems.