Two otherwise identical firms that enter the same market in different months, one in January and one in December, will report dramatically different annual sales for the first calendar year of operations. This partial year effect in annual data leads to downward biased observations of the level...

This paper provides a framework for understanding the cross- section and time series approaches which have been used to test the convergence hypothesis. First, we present two definitions of convergence which capture the implications of the neoclassical growth model for the relationship between...