Spending on productive infrastructure is seen as an important contributor to long term economic growth. Several authors have documented a downward trend in public investment during the last three decades and warned about its possible detrimental effects on the economy. A not well-realized fact...

This paper explores the nuanced relationship between fiscal decentralization and fiscal sustainability. Employing panel data analyses, it scrutinizes how decentralization influences fiscal discipline across different governmental levels. Results for 185 countries show that while tax...

The implications of delegating fiscal decision making power to sub-national governments has become an area of significant interest over the past two decades, in the expectation that these reforms will lead to better and more efficient provision of public goods and services. The move towards...

The system GMM estimator for dynamic panel data models combines moment conditions for the model in first differences with moment conditions for the model in levels. It has been shown to improve on the GMM estimator in the first differenced model in terms of bias and root mean squared error....

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

This paper investigates the major drivers of governmental redistribution. We retest the Meltzer-Richard hypothesis and account for a plethora of political, institutional, and cultural forces that influence the scope of redistribution. Extended and harmonized data on effective redistribution...

This study examines the relationship between real domestic sales and real exports for Turkish manufacturing firms. Dynamic panel data estimations based on firm-level data for the period 2004-2014 suggest that the two variables are substitutes. Other factors held constant, we estimate that a 10...

This paper evaluates the first-differenced maximum likelihood (FDML) and the continuously updating system generalized method of moments (CU-GMM) estimators of dynamic panel models when the data is close to non-stationary. This case is far from trivial, as a high degree of persistence is the norm...

Using a novel dataset I examine to what extent the introduction of national Asset Management Companies (AMCs) impacts the effects of bank-specific and macroeconomic determinants of the NPLs ratio for European countries. This study provides evidence on how national AMCs help to alleviate the...