Are lending contracts between international financial institutions (IFIs) and sovereign borrowers optimal? To address this question this paper builds on two ideas. First, the prospect of future debt relief can make it profitable for an IFI to continue lending even if lending contracts are...

This article presents a non-Markovian regime switching model in which the regime states depend on the sign of an autoregressive latent variable. The magnitude of the latent variable indexes the `strength' of the state or how deeply the system is embedded in the current regime. The autoregressive...

Spatial models of voting behaviour are the dominant paradigm in political science. Consistent with this approach, it will be the case that, ceteris paribus, voters should vote for the party nearest to them on the political spectrum. A key question is how we measure nearness or distance. We...

This paper develops a new simulation estimation algorithm that is particularly useful for estimating dynamic panel data models with unobserved endogenous state variables. The new approach can deal with the commonly encountered and widely discussed ``initial conditions problem,'' as well as the...

This paper considers dynamic time series binary choice models. It shows in a time series setting the validity of the dynamic probit likelihood procedure when lags of the dependent binary variable are used as regressors, and it establishes the asymptotic validity of Horowitz' smoothed maximum...

This paper utilizes a nonparametric panel data sample selection model to correct selection bias in the analysis of longitudinal medical claims data. Selection bias in the health economics data is a common problem and many health economists have used Heckman type selection models in...

This paper studies the bargaining game between the president and the congress when these two players have conflicting claims to a fixed amount of resources. I distinguish between situations of "pure divided government", that is when the congress is united "against" the president, and the...

We employ a regime-switching approach to the identification of banking crises. This approach reduces the arbitrariness in crisis identification by endogenizing the choices of crisis threshold and crisis duration. Using a sample of 47 countries, we show that this approach also subject to several...

The main goal of this paper is to investigate the role of campaign fund in congressional careers. To achieve this goal, we specify a dynamic model of career decisions of a member of Congress. In particular, we model how the amount of campaign funds raised affects the probability of winning...

Empirical studies of economic growth across countries are abundant and rich in conclusions, some of them widely accepted. This is not the case, however, with the empirics of business cycles. Particularly, there exists little evidence explaining why some countries take more time than others...