This paper considers the relationship between growth in real per capita GDP and the growth in real per capita GDP of the poorest 20% of a country. It uses the data set compiled by Dollar and Kraay (2002), but come to very different conclusions. We argue that if the purpose is to answer questions...

This paper provides a survey of the recent progress in the literature of financial development and economic growth. The survey highlights that most empirical studies focus on either testing the role of financial development in stimulating economic growth or examining the direction of causality...

To study whether foreign aid fuels personal, regional and ethnic favoritism, we use satellite data on nighttime light for any region in any aid-recipient country, and we determine for each year and each country the region in which the current political leader was born. Having a panel with 22,850...

Most studies of comparative productivities fail to find evidence of convergence in OECD manufacturing despite major economic growth theories predicting convergence. Using manufacturing data for 19 OECD countries over the period from 1870 to 2006 this study finds strong evidence of unconditional...

This paper examines the effect of international patent stock on total factor productivity for 16 OECD countries over the past 120 years. The results show that the international patent stock is highly influential for economic growth and, together with knowledge spillovers through the channel of...

This paper considers a class of parametric models with nonparametric autoregressive errors. A new test is proposed and studied to deal with the parametric specification of the nonparametric autoregressive errors with either stationarity or nonstationarity. Such a test procedure can initially...

This paper establishes a suite of uniform consistency results for nonparametric kernel density and regression estimators when the time series regressors concerned are nonstationary null-recurrent Markov chains. Under suitable conditions, certain rates of convergence are also obtained for the...

Local linear fitting is a popular nonparametric method in statistical and econometric modelling. Lu and Linton (2007) established the pointwise asymptotic distribution for the local linear estimator of a nonparametric regression function under the condition of near epoch dependence. In this...

This paper treats estimation in a class of new nonlinear threshold autoregressive models with both a stationary and a unit root regime. Existing literature on nonstationary threshold models have basically focused on models where the nonstationarity can be removed by differencing and/or where the...

In this paper we propose a new methodology for selecting the window length in Singular Spectral Analysis in which the window length is determined from the data prior to the commencement of modeling. The selection procedure is based on statistical tests designed to test the convergence of the...