Transparency is better when it's frequent

There's a piece on [the open knowledge foundation blog][1] that raises an interesting point about how tightening the release cycle for public economic data for countries leads to lower borrowing costs:

Finally, the benefits of transparency are not only restricted to reducing corruption and lowering the cost of information. A comparative study finds that transparency – measured by accuracy and frequency of macroeconomic information released to the public – leads to lower borrowing costs in sovereign bond markets. Open data pays off in many ways, in many different contexts.

This feels like a fairly bold claim to make, but when an economics PhD candidate is making them, and explicitly so, it feel worth sharing:

These are just a few selective examples of how cutting-edge economic research has identified the benefits of openness in a diverse range of situations. The cases I presented are not based on correlations, but carefully established causal relationships, leaving little doubt – at least within the context studied – that information matters, big time.

<! links --> [1]: http://blog.okfn.org/2012/10/05/the-benefits-of-open-data-evidence-from-economic-research "The Benefits of Open Data – Evidence from Economic Research"