Estimating nonlinear effects of continuous covariates by penalized splines is well established for regressions with cross-sectional data as well as for panel data regressions with random effects. Penalized splines are particularly advantageous since they enable both the estimation of unknown...

Recently prostate and ovarian cancer has been related to milk consumption. However, existing observational studies based on country level data do not attempt to identify causal effects since they are only based on simple cross-sectional analyses. This paper takes a step toward estimating of...

This paper discusses likelihood-based estimation of linear panel data models with general predetermined variables and individual-specific effects. The resulting (pseudo) maximum likelihood estimator is asymptotically equivalent to standard GMM but tends to have smaller finite-sample biases as...