in the present time, phenomenon like globalization, regionalism and economic integration are the basic issues which bring many positive consequences to the world economy. regionalism and economic integration are one of the ways that developing countries can adopt to collate the globalization process. to acknowledge their own abilities or, to settle the commercial and economic disputes in their ...

Using a standard factor decomposition of a panel of forecasts, we have shown that the forecast uncertainty from the standpoint of a policy maker can be expressed as the disagreement among forecasters plus the perceived variability of common aggregate shocks. Thus, the uncertainty of the average forecast is not the variance of the average forecast but rather the average of the variances of the i...

This paper presents the nonlinear IV methodology as an effective inferential basis for nonstationary panels. The nonlinear IV method resolves the inferential difficulties in testing for unit roots arising from the intrinsic heterogeneities and cross-dependencies of panel models. Individual units are allowed to be dependent through correlations among innovations, interrelatedness of short-run dy...

This paper investigates the past effectiveness of the Maastricht Treaty (MT) and Stability and Growth Pact (SGP) in disciplining fiscal policy in the Euro zone. We estimate fiscal reaction functions for a panel of 11 members of the Euro zone including the more recent period of the reformed SGP, and compare them with fiscal responses from other “industrialized” OECD countries. Our main finding i...

Isolated effects of labor and product market institutions as well as the interaction between both aforementioned categories on unemployment have been extensively discussed in the empirical literature. However, interaction effects between individual labor market institutions have been widely neglected, mainly due to the infeasibility to correctly specify the model. In this paper, a model averagi...

The objective of this paper is to estimate the impacts of medium and long term participation in microfinance programs. It utilises a new, large and unique panel dataset collected from treatment and control households from 1997 to 2005. The data enables us to identify continuing participants in the program as well as newcomers and leavers. We employ different estimation strategies including trip...

Maximum Likelihood Estimation and Lagrange Multiplier Tests for Panel Seemingly Unrelated Regressions with Spatial Lag and Spatial Errors: An Application to Hedonic Housing Prices in Paris This paper proposes maximum likelihood estimators for panel seemingly unrelated regressions with both spatial lag and spatial error components. We study the general case where spatial effects are incorporated...

We consider the estimation of the usual Gravity model of trade, which involves flows of trade, say exports, from country i to country j in time period t. We suggest an easy-to-impliment generalised method of moments estimator that avoids the issues associated with the usual fixed effects treatment of the unobserved heterogeneity in this type of models and at the same time provides consistent pa...

abstract in this paper, income per capita convergence hypothesis is tested in selected oic countries. for this purpose, we use the time series model and univariate kpss stationary test with multiple structural breaks (carrion-i-silvestre et al. (2005)) over the period 1950-2008. the results show that most oic countries could not catch up toward usa. although because of some positive term of tra...