CEMAC countries, with an aim of coordinating their budget policies, established within their union some rules of economic policy which seem to be restrictive for an effective budget policy and thus sustainable in the long run. Indeed, in the economic theory, several arguments were advanced to...

This study examines the foreign direct investment (FDI) attractiveness for Greece as a host country in the period 1998-2007. The purpose of this paper is to analyze the impact of variables, such as market size, labour costs, trade openness, taxes, inflation and economic stability. The manuscript...

A semiparametric fixed effects model is introduced to describe the nonlinear trending phenomenon in panel data analysis and it allows for the cross-sectional dependence in both the regressors and the residuals. A semiparametric profile likelihood approach based on the first-stage local linear...

This paper is concerned with developing a nonparametric time-varying coefficient model with fixed effects to characterize nonstationarity and trending phenomenon in nonlinear panel data analysis. We develop two methods to estimate the trend function and the coefficient function without taking...

In this paper, we study semiparametric estimation for a single-index panel data model where the nonlinear link function varies among the individuals. We propose using the so-called refined minimum average variance estimation based on a local linear smoothing method to estimate both the...

A common and longstanding assumption in the economic growth literature has been that total factor productivity growth is lower in the agriculture sector than in the rest of the economy. Using a stochastic production frontier finite mixture model, labor productivity change is decomposed into...

Abstract Despite their importance from a policy point of view, empirical studies on the effects of growth centres in their regions are rare. This paper analyses mutual relationships between growth processes in centres and their surrounding hinterlands in 19 Finnish regions. Annual population...

We estimate the effect of employer offers of retiree health benefits (RHBs) on the timing of retirement using a sample of Health and Retirement Study (HRS) men observed over a period of up to 12 years. We hypothesize that the effect of RHBs differs for workers of different ages—a hypothesis we...

This paper studies the nature of spillover effects in bank lending flows from advanced to the emerging market economies and identifies specific channels through which such effects occur. Based on a gravity model we examine a panel data set on cross-border bank flows from 17 advanced to 28...

This paper analyzes differences in welfare utilization between immigrants and natives in Sweden using a large panel data set, LINDA, for the years 1990 to 1996. Both welfare expenditures and immigration increased in Sweden in the 1990’s. We find that immigrants use welfare to a greater...