This thesis first investigates various issues related with model averaging, and then evaluates two policies, i.e. West Development Drive in China and fiscal decentralization in U.S, using econometric tools. Chapter 2 proposes a hierarchical weighted least squares (HWALS) method to address...

Abstract: Prediction under model uncertainty is an important and difficult issue. Traditional prediction methods (such as pretesting) are based on model selection followed by prediction in the selected model, but the reported prediction and the reported prediction variance ignore the uncertainty...

This paper reconsiders the ‘curse of resources’ hypothesis for the case of China, and distinguishes between resource abundance, resource rents, and resource dependence. Resource abundance and resource rents are shown to be approximately equivalent, and their association with resource...