Classical growth convergence regressions fail to account for various sources of heterogeneity and nonlinearity. While recent contributions are able to address either the one or the other, we present a simple two-step method to address both issues. Based on a slightly augmented version of a...

This paper investigates the asymptotic properties of a penalized empirical likelihood estimator for moment restriction models when the number of parameters ( p n ) and/or the number of moment restrictions increases with the sample size. Our main result is that the SCAD-penalized empirical...

In Unconditional Convergence, Rodrik (2011b) documented that manufacturing industries exhibit unconditional convergence in labor productivity. We provide a novel semi-parametric specification for convergence equations and show that the speed of convergence varies systematically with...