In this paper we consider the estimation of a panel data regression model with spatial autoregressive disturbances, fixed effects and unknown heteroskedasticity. Following the work by Kelejian and Prucha (1999), Lee and Liu (2006a) and others, we adopt the Generalized Method of Moments (GMM) and...

Competitiveness of manufacturing industry is regarded as one of the basic determinants of long run sustainable growth of a country. Therefore it is important to have an understanding of relative positions of countries in terms of competitiveness and determinants of competitive ability. This...

The paper analyses the savings developments in Romania during transition in comparison with the other CEE countries, starting from the definition of savings from the national accounts. Moreover, saving analysis is performed by institutional sectors, especially for population and nonfinancial...

Prediction is difficult. In this paper we use panel data methods to make reasonably accurate short term ex-post predictions of house prices across 353 local authority areas in England. The issue of prediction over the longer term is also addressed, and a simple method that makes use of the...

This paper revisits Grunfeld's well-known investment data, one of the most widely used data sets in all of applied econometrics, on the occasion of their 50th anniversary. It presents, apparently for the first time after the publication of the original Chicago Ph.D. thesis, the full data set,...

Fiscal decentralization is widely proposed as an efficient means to accommodate ethnic violence. Yet while most of the econometric cross-country studies supports this view, case studies offer mixed results. In this paper, it is argued that this is partly due to the fact that fiscal...

Despite an abundance of empirical evidence on crime spanning over forty years, there exists no consensus on the impact of the criminal justice system on crime activity. We argue that this may be due to the combined effect of simultaneity, omitted variable bias and aggregation bias that may...

Suicide is a major cause of preventable death. Restricting access to lethal means has been identified as an effective approach to suicide prevention, and firearms regulations are one way to reduce gun availability. This study examines the relationship between state firearms regulations and...

To be able to predict when a nation will go bust has been one of toughest challenges in macroeconomics. Considerable research and effort has been put into this direction but still we are not in a position to say anything with certainty. This paper analyzes panel pool data on 31 countries across...

The present study investigates the determinants of interregional migration flows in Italy in the light of the upsurge occurred in 1996, after two decades of decreasing internal migration rates. We apply the fixed effect vector decomposition estimator (FEVD) on a gravity model using bilateral...