South Africa has experienced high budget deficits accompanied by sluggish economic growth over the years. Fears mount that such a trend may worsen due to the advent of the Covid-19. Yet, the effect of budget deficit on economic growth remains one of the widely debated topics in economics. This...

Rajan and Zingales (2003) hypothesize that openness—trade and financial—is a crucial determinant of financial development. The main policy implication emerging from this hypothesis is that openness should be promoted as a means of facilitating economic growth through financial development....

In this paper, we propose a consistent nonparametric test for linearity in a large dimensional panel data model with interactive fixed effects. Both lagged dependent variables and conditional heteroskedasticity of unknown form are allowed in the model. We estimate the model under the null...

Aid flows are included into the standard cross-country catch-up relation. Robustness of the result is tested by changing time periods and by adding extra variables. The main results are: Absolute convergence and absolute aid effectiveness are both rejected. While conditional convergence is...

This paper considers kernel-based nonparametric estimation of panel models using local linear least squares, when both the fixed individual effects and the time effects present. The marginal effect is of the main interest. A within-group type nonparametric estimator is developed, where the...

We study the eventual structural differences of climate change leading ‘actors' such as Northern EU countries, and ‘lagging actors' - southern EU countries and the ‘Umbrella group' - with regard to long run (1960-2001) carbon-income relationships. Parametric and semi parametric panel...

We study the eventual structural differences of climate change leading ‘actors’ such as Northern EU countries, and ‘lagging actors’ - southern EU countries and the ‘Umbrella group’ - with regard to long run (1960-2001) carbon-income relationships. Parametric and semi parametric panel...

Applications tend to ignore that measured TFP reflects the variation of output that cannot be explained by changes in inputs. Such a change is not necessarily technological, so measured TFP differences across firms are an amalgam of technological, efficiency and other differences in attributes,...

This study aims at analyzing the difference in the level of economic development between China's counties from the two perspectives of industrial policy and production efficiency. Based on panel data of 1830 Chinese counties, this study employs the new classical economic growth theory framework...

This paper analyzes periods of economic stagnation in a panel of countries. We test whether stagnation can be predicted by institutional characteristics and political shocks, and compare the impacts of such variables with those of traditional macroeconomic variables. We examine the determinants...