In this paper, we estimate a residential water demand function for the Reunion island, a French overseas territory which experiences, despite its tropical climate, a lot of stress on this resource. We develop specifications of linear and non linear expenditure systems, taking into account the...

We study the connection between economic performance and the quality of government institutions for the sample of 103 Italian NUTS3 regions, including new measures of institutional performance calculated using data on the provision of different areas of public services. In order to address...

This paper describes the use of instrumental-variables (IV) to estimate causal effects of foster care on long- and short-term outcomes. This estimation strategy provides a tool to evaluate what are known as “natural experiments”: settings that mimic randomization usually associated with a...

This paper exploits the significant response of real GDP growth of Sub-Saharan African countries to exogenous international commodity price and rainfall shocks to construct instrumental variables estimates of the tax revenue elasticity IV estimates yield that a 1% increase in GDP increases tax...

It is now widely recognized that the most commonly used efficient two-step GMM estimator may have large bias in small samples. This problem has motivated the search for alternative estimators with better finite sample properties. Two classes of alternatives are considered in this paper. The...

The ability of six alternative bootstrap methods to reduce the bias of GMM parameter estimates is examined in an instrumental variable framework using Monte Carlo analysis. Promising results were found for the two bootstrap estimators suggested in the paper.

Since Durbin (1954) and Sargan (1958), instrumental variable (IV) method has long been one of the most popular procedures among economists and other social scientists to handle linear models with errors-in-variables. A direct application of this method to nonlinear errors-in-variables models,...

The predictor that minimizes mean-squared prediction error is used to derive a goodness-of-fit measure that offers an asymptotically valid model selection criterion for a wide variety of regression models. In particular, a new goodness-of-fit criterion (cr2) is proposed for censored or otherwise...

This paper surveys the empirical evidence on casual effects of education on earnings for Germany and compares alternatie studies in the light of their underlying identifying assumptions. We work out the different assumptions taken by various studies, which lead to rather different...

This is an empirical study of the impact of foreign direct investment (FDI) on income. It presents cross-country evidence that inward FDI is positively correlated with income. In addition, an instrument for FDI is constructed to address the issue of endogeneity. The results show that...