During the last decade, economists have intensively searched for evidence on the importance of the Balassa-Samuelson (B-S) hypothesis in explaining nominal convergence. One general result is that B-S can at best explain only part of the excess inflation observed in the European catching-up...

Is there a role for debt beyond curing overaccumulation of capital? Does dynamic efficiency and the infeasibility of debt Ponzi schemes eliminate any Pareto-improving role for a government in a competitive economy with complete markets? Is there an optimal maturity structure of public debt?...

Globally installed wind power capacity has grown tremendously since 2000. This study focuses on the local economic impacts of wind power deployment. A theoretical model shows that wind power deployment is not necessarily driven by locally-accruing economic payoffs, but also by other factors such...

This paper analyzes the relationship between gender and corruption, controlling for country-specific heterogeneity in a panel framework. Using annual observations in a pooled setting (no country-fixed effects) confirms the positive link between the involvement of women in society and the absence...

We develop a new quantile-based panel data framework to study the nature of income persistence and the transmission of income shocks to consumption. Log-earnings are the sum of a general Markovian persistent component and a transitory innovation. The persistence of past shocks to earnings is...

This paper proposes new ℓ1-penalized quantile regression estimators for panel data, which explicitly allows for individual heterogeneity associated with covariates. We conduct Monte Carlo simulations to assess the small sample performance of the new estimators and provide comparisons of new...

This paper studies the public sector wage gap in Spain, by gender, skill level and type of contract, using recent administrative data from tax records. We estimate wage distributions in the presence of covariates separately for men and women in the public and in the private sectors, and we take...

This paper develops a nonparametric methodology for treatment evaluation with multiple outcome periods under treatment endogeneity and missing outcomes. We use instrumental variables, pre-treatment characteristics, and short-term (or intermediate) outcomes to identify the average treatment...

In this paper, we investigate how economic, political and institutional factors affect the choice of exchange rate regimes, using data on eight MENA (Middle East and North Africa) countries over the 1984-2016 period. Specifically, we run random-effects ordered probit regressions of the...

With the increased availability of longitudinal data, dynamic panel data models have become commonplace. Moreover, the properties of various estimators of such models are well known. However, we show that these estimators breakdown when the data are irregularly spaced along the time dimension....