This paper employs the Panzar and Rosse (1987) and the Bresnahan models to determine the level of competition in the South African banking sector. This level of competition was tested during the period 1998 to 2008 for the Panzar and Rosse approach and from 1992 to 2008 for the Bresnahan model....

The aim of this article is to estimate the determinants of industrial productivity growth in Colombia’s regions. In this regard, we follow to Kumbhakar and Lovell (2000), who decompose total factor productivity growth into three sources: technical change, scale economies and technical...

The second generation fiscal federalism (SGFF) approach is used as a reference to analyze the political and fiscal institutional design of Bolivia’s decentralization model and its evolution. Subnational public finance data up to 2008 is used to verify that decentralization of expenditure was...

This study is an investigation into relative overeducation and life satisfaction using British longitudinal data. The focus is on young people rather than the whole of the life cycle, an arguably more homogenous group. Such a focus means that the overeducation variable does not simply capture...

A particularly useful approach for analyzing pooled cross sectional and time series data is Swamy's random coefficient panel data (RCPD) model. This paper examines the performance of Swamy's estimators and tests associated with this model by using Monte Carlo simulation. The Monte Carlo study...

This paper replicates the Johnson et al.’s (1998) empirical analysis of the affects of regulatory discretion on the unofficial economy. The narrow replication uses the data set of the original study which comprises of 49 countries for the year 1997. The wide replication is performed in two...

The article highlights the results of quantitative evaluation of impact the financial mechanism elements on increase of green business enterprises at different stages of the life cycle and provides a comparative analysis of this impact. Also there were presented the EU countries which have an...

The paper presents a political agency model that observes how budgetary decisions on public good production affect the prospects of holding office for an incumbent political party. A simple budgetary function is broadened to include other expenditures such as public sector wages and social...

In this paper we discuss how the forecasting performance of Bayesian VARs is affected by a number of specification choices. In the baseline case, we use a Normal-Inverted Wishart (N-IW) prior that, when combined with a (pseudo-) iterated approach, makes the analytical computation of h-step ahead...

This paper investigates the factors that determine differences across OECD countries in health outcomes, using data on life expectancy at age 65, over the period 1960 to 2007. We estimate a production function where life expectancy depends on health and social spending, lifestyle variables, and...