Scholarly Comments on Academic Economics

How to Handle Economic Freedom: Reply to Lawson

by ,

*Jakob de Haan* is Professor of Political Economy, University of Groningen, the Netherlands. He is also director of SOM, the research institute and graduate school of the faculties of Management and Organisation and Economics of the University of Groninge
*Jan-Egbert Sturm* is Professor of Applied Macroeconomics and director of KOF—Swiss Institute for Business Cycle Research both at the ETH Zurich, Switzerland (Link). He is also a member of the European Economic Advisory Group at CESifo, Munich (Link). His

Abstract

IN HIS COMMENT ON THE ECONOMIC FREEDOM SURVEY ARTICLE we wrote with Susanna Lundström (De Haan et al. 2006), Lawson (2006) criticizes five elements of our article: 1.Our use of the term “zealots.” 2.Our remarks on the role of government in the construction of the economic freedom index. 3.Our discussion of the composition of the economic freedom index. 4.Our criticism of empirical growth models that include both the level and the change in economic freedom. 5.Our endorsement of a modeling approach wherein researchers run many specifications