Italy is a case study in lowest-low fertility. Its internal heterogeneity is substantial, and changing over time. While historically fertility was higher in the South, in recent years differentials have reversed. In this paper we adopt a macro-level perspective to investigate the convergence of regional fertility in Italy over the period 1952–2009. Then, we estimate a series of spatial panel re...

This paper establishes asymptotic properties of quasi-maximum likelihood estimators for SAR panel data models with fixed effects and SAR disturbances. A direct approach is to estimate all the parameters including the fixed effects. Because of the incidental parameter problem, some parameter estimatorsmay be inconsistent or their distributions are not properly centered. We propose an alternative...

We empirically investigate the determinants of local authority mental health expenditure in England. We adopt a reduced form demand and supply model, extended to incorporate possible interaction among authorities, as well as unobserved heterogeneity. The model is estimated using an annual panel dataset that allows us to explore both time-series and cross-municipality variation in mental health ...

Abstract. This paper proposes a penalized quantile regression estimator for panel data that explicitly considers individual heterogeneity associated with the covariates. We provide conditions under which the estimator is asymptotically Gaussian, and the harshness of the penalization can be determined by minimizing asymptotic mean squared error. We investigate finite sample and asymptotic perfor...

A number of recent papers have found evidence of interdependencies in utility functions, in that, ceteris paribus, individual well-being falls as others' income or consumption increases. This paper asks if, in addition, the distribution of income in the reference group matters. I consider full-time employees in eleven waves of British panel data, and take life satisfaction and the GHQ-12 as mea...

This paper aims to reveal the nexus for sulfur dioxide (SO2) emission and income, as well as the effects of technical progress on SO2 emission in China based on environment Kuznets curve (EKC) hypothesis. The spatial panel technique is used in case the coefficient estimates are biased due to the negligence of spatial dependence. With the provincial panel data of China from 2004 to 2014, this is...