Are natural resources a “curse” or a “blessing”? The empirical evidence suggests either outcome is possible. The paper surveys a variety of hypotheses and supporting evidence for why some countries benefit and others lose from the presence of natural resources. These include that a...

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 cross-sectionally heteroskedastic. This extension is not trivial due to the incidental parameters problem that...

This paper contributes to the GMM literature by introducing the idea of self-instrumenting target variables instead of searching for instruments that are uncorrelated with the errors, in cases where the correlation between the target variables and the errors can be derived. The advantage of the...

This paper provides a new comparative analysis of pooled least squares and fixed effects estimators of the slope coefficients in the case of panel data models when the time dimension (T) is fixed while the cross section dimension (N) is allowed to increase without bounds. The individual effects...

The argument that policy risk, i.e., uncertainty about monetary and fiscal policy, has been holding back the economic recovery in the U.S. during the Great Recession has a large popular appeal. We analyze the role of policy risk in explaining business cycle fluctuations by using an estimated New...

This paper extends the benchmark Macro-Finance model by introducing, next to the standard macroeconomic factors, additional liquidity-related and return forecasting factors. Liquidity factors are obtained from a decomposition of the TED spread while the return-forecasting (risk premium) factor...

This paper proposes a novel test of zero pricing errors for the linear factor pricing model when the number of securities, N, can be large relative to the time dimension, T, of the return series. The test is based on Student t tests of individual securities and has a number of advantages over...

This paper deals with the economics of Bitcoins in two ways. First, it broadens the discussion on how to capture Bitcoins using economic terms. Center stage in this analysis take the discussion of some unique characteristics of this market as well as the comparison of Bitcoins and gold. Second,...

We have argued that from the standpoint of a policy maker, the uncertainty of using the average forecast is not the variance of the average, but rather the average of the variances of the individual forecasts that incorporate idiosyncratic risks. With a slight reformulation of the loss function...

This paper proposes a generalized panel data model with random effects and first-order spatially autocorrelated residuals that encompasses two previously suggested specifications. The first one is described in Anselin’s (1988) book and the second one by Kapoor, Kelejian, and Prucha (2007). Our...