Political economy literature acknowledges the importance of democratic learning and of fiscal rules in preventing politically driven deficits. This paper investigates the role of these factors for the Political Budget Cycles in the ten Central and East European (CEE) countries from 1990 to 2010....

A new method is introduced for panel-data models. Asymptotic robustness is used for a multivariate model with latent variables for a family of estimators. It is shown numerically that in comparison to standard methods we obtain: 1) better predictions in out-of-sample occasions; 2) smaller...

The well-known problem of too many instruments in dynamic panel data GMM is dealt with in detail in Roodman (2009, Oxford Bull. Econ. Statist.). The present paper goes one step further by providing a solution to this problem: factorisation of the standard instrument set is shown to be a valid...

This paper considers the issue of GMM estimation of a short dynamic panel data model when the errors are correlated across individuals. We focus particularly on the conditions required in the cross-sectional dimension of the error process for the dynamic panel GMM estimator to remain consistent....

The well-known problem of too many instruments in dynamic panel data GMM is dealt with in detail in Roodman (2009, Oxford Bull. Econ. Statist.). The present paper goes one step further by providing a solution to this problem: factorisation of the standard instrument set is shown to be a valid...

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 multi-factor error structure. In this case, the standard dynamic panel estimators fail...

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...

Financial development has a major role in the sustainable economic growth of Central and Eastern European emerging countries, particularly after their political and structural changes. These changes required a reform of financial sectors of these countries, such as capital market development,...

The central theme of the paper is the financial development issue in a context of financial globalization for the south Mediterranean sea (SMS) countries. The choice of this theme is motivated by the importance of the economic development and the growth in these countries, who are usually the...

This paper investigates how financial globalization and financial development affect income inequality within a country. We demonstrate that when a country is financially closed to the world market, the Gini coefficient is monotonically decreasing with respect to the degree of financial...