This paper introduces two easy to calculate estimators with desirable properties for the autoregressive parameter in dynamic panel data models. The estimators are (nearly) unbiased and perform satisfactorily even for small samples in either the time-series or cross-section dimension.

This paper introduces a new estimator for the fixed effects dynamic panel data model with exogenous variables. This estimator does not share some of the drawbacks of recently developed IV and GMM estimators and has a good performance even in small samples. The nearly unbiased estimator is...

The extent of beta- and sigma-convergence of average labor productivity across manufacturing industries in 18 OECD-countries over the period 1972-1992 show large inter-industry differences. One reason for these differences is knowledge and capital barriers preventing catch-up to occur. We find...

This paper concentrates on negatively skewed one-sided distributions as an explanation of the occurence of positive (negative) skewness in the case of stochastic production (cost) frontier analysis. It takes as example the binomial distribution that can have negative or positive skew and derives...