Local governments may increase expenditure arrears to relax the financial constraints induced by intergovernmental transfer cuts. We assess this hypothesis using information from accounting and financial reports from Italian municipalities for the period 2003-2010. By exploiting the long-lasting...

This paper provides a novel mechanism for identifying and estimating latent group structures in panel data using penalized techniques. We consider both linear and nonlinear models where the regression coefficients are heterogeneous across groups but homogeneous within a group and the group...

For every U.S.-listed security for every year between 2001-2017, I run four different event studies to calculate four separate objective measures of the efficiency of the market for that security for that year, which provide an objective characterization of the market for that security in that...

The problem of instrument proliferation and its consequences (overfitting of the endogenous explanatory variables, biased IV and GMM estimators, weakening of the power of the overidentification tests) are well known. This paper introduces a statistical method to reduce the instrument count. The...

This paper proposes a panel unit root test for micropanels with short time dimension (T) and large cross section (N). There are several distinctive features of this test. First, the test is based on a panel AR(1) model, which allows for cross-sectional dependency, which is introduced by the...

We evaluate the economic significance of linguistic barriers to communication in 226 US cities from 1980 to 2000 to test for the ‘paradox of diversity', namely, whether knowledge exchange is inhibited by linguistic barriers to communication across social groups. We find: one, linguistic and...

We study the extent to which the impact of tail risk spillovers, originating in the financial sector and affecting real-economy firms, depends on the level of cash holdings and the financial conditions of the firm. Empirical evidence on 4,320 firms located in 16 European countries, from 2003 to...

In this paper, we empirically investigate the link between forecasts transparency and macroeconomic volatility as measured by inflation and output growth volatility in developing economies. We adopt the quasi-random controlled experiments methodology that divides our sample of 49 developing...

In the context of rising government debt levels in advanced economies and the ongoing euro zone debt crisis, there has been a revival of academic and policy debate on the impact of growing government debt on economic growth. This data-rich study offers an econometric investigation of the...

The rising government debt levels in the aftermath of global financial crisis and the ongoing euro zone debt crisis have necessitated the revival of the academic and policy debate on the impact of growing debt levels on growth. This study provides a data-rich analysis of the dynamics of...