After more than 20 years of European Monetary Union (EMU), surprisingly few scientific studies exist which study the growth effects of introducing a common currency in large parts of the European Union. I do so using a large panel (NUTS3 data) of regional data for the EU-15. Some 800 (treated)...

Since Mandelbrot's seminal work (1963), alpha-stable distributions with infinite variance have been regarded as a more realistic distributional assumption than the normal distribution for some economic variables, especially financial data. After providing a brief survey of theoretical results on...

Across the social sciences, lagged explanatory variables are a common strategy to confront challenges to causal identification using observational data. We show that "lag identification"--the use of lagged explanatory variables to solve endogeneity problems--is an illusion: lagging independent...

Banking is increasingly a-spatial. However, the environment matters for small banks. Indeed, they are embedded in narrowed markets and hence benefit from proximity to their member-customers. By referring to multilevel approach, this article aims at measuring how much the performance of Italian...

This paper assesses how duplicate records affect the results from regression analysis of survey data, and it compares the effectiveness of five solutions to minimize the risk of obtaining biased estimates. Results show that duplicate records create considerable risk of obtaining biased...

This paper introduces the spanel pacakge developped under the R statistical programming language.spanel estimates the spatial autoregressive panel models using the two stage least squares method proposed by Kelejian and Prucha [1998] and Lee [2003] and Baltagi and Liu, 2011.

The synthetic control (SC) method has been recently proposed as an alternative to estimate treatment effects in comparative case studies. The SC relies on the assumption that there is a weighted average of the control units that reconstructs the potential outcome of the treated unit in the...

The synthetic control (SC) method has been recently proposed as an alternative to estimate treatment effects in comparative case studies. In this paper, we revisit the SC method in a linear factor model setting and consider the asymptotic properties of the SC estimator when the number of...

This paper considers a flexible semiparametric spatial autoregressive (mixed-regressive) model in which unknown coefficients are permitted to be nonparametric functions of some contextual variables to allow for potential nonlinearities and parameter heterogeneity in the spatial relationship....

The synthetic control (SC) method has been recently proposed as an alternative to estimate treatment effects in comparative case studies. In this paper, we revisit the SC method in a linear factor model setting and derive conditions under which the SC estimator is asymptotically unbiased when...