On both sides of the Atlantic the regulation of gas transmission networks has undergone major changes since the early 1990’s. Whereas in the US the long-standing regime of cost-plus regulation was complemented by increasing pipe-to-pipe competition, most European countries moved towards...

This paper studies the impact of the level and volatility of commodity terms of trade on economic growth, as well as on the three main growth channels: total factor productivity, physical capital accumulation, and human capital acquisition. We argue that volatility, rather than abundance per se,...

This paper revisits the resource curse paradox and studies the impact of resource rents and their volatility on economic growth under varying institutional quality. Using five-year non-overlapping observations between 1970 and 2005 for 112 countries, we find that while resource rents enhance...

This study explores the link between energy spending and health satisfaction. We aim to show that energy spending is a driver of health satisfaction and therefore of the overall quality of life of individuals. This has important implications for policy makers especially in the context of fuel...

This paper proposes the transformed maximum likelihood estimator for short dynamic panel data models with interactive fixed effects, and provides an extension of Hsiao et al. (2002) that allows for a multifactor error structure. This is an important extension since it retains the advantages of...

The residential demand for energy is growing steadily and the trend is expected to continue for the foreseeable future. Household spending on energy services tends to increase with income. We explore household total spending on energy and on electricity and gas separately. We use an extensive...

This paper extends the transformed maximum likelihood approach for estimation of dynamic panel data models by Hsiao, Pesaran, and Tahmiscioglu (2002) to the case where the errors are crosssectionally heteroskedastic. This extension is not trivial due to the incidental parameters problem that...

This paper proposes a new instrumental variables approach for consistent and asymptotically efficient estimation of panel data models with weakly exogenous or endogenous regressors and residuals generated by a multifactor error structure. In this case, the standard dynamic panel estimators fail...

The electricity reform in Colombia has exhibited gains in terms of reliability but its effects on firms efficiency and service quality have not been clear. Previous studies evaluating the performance of distribution companies after the reform have not found evidence of improvements, although...

This paper investigates the long-run effects of public debt and inflation on economic growth. Our contribution is both theoretical and empirical. On the theoretical side, we develop a cross-sectionally augmented distributed lag (CS-DL) approach to the estimation of long-run effects in dynamic...