Following the present atmosphere of budgetary cuts we analyze the effects of fiscal consolidation on the composition of government expenditures by functions. Using a dynamic voter group decision model and exploiting the panel structure of the dataset – 26 OECD countries over the period 1970-1997by GMM estimation we find that fiscal adjustments protect social expenditure. Nevertheless, we find t...

This paper implements a reduced form credit default swap (CDS) pricing model. Theoretical prices found are compared with market prices to evaluate the goodness of fit. Theoretical prices and pricing errors are inspected by rating classes, sectors of economic activity and currency denomination of CDS. Pricing errors are analyzed through panel data estimation techniques, to find determinants of p...

Job Losses and Child Outcomes Based on matched employer-employee data from Norway, we analyze the effects of worker displacement in 1986-1987 on their children’s earnings in 1999-2001. Using displacement of fathers to indicate an exogenous earnings shock we seek to identify whether family resources have a direct effect on children’s economic outcome. As in previous Scandinavian studies, we find...

Changes in US Immigration laws that occurred during the mid 1980s to the late 1990s led to a sharp increase in criminal deportations. Using panel data for a sample of 38 developed and developing countries, I provide evidence for a statistically significantly positive causal relationship between increases in the numbers of criminal deportees and increases in intentional homicide rates. The magni...

Measurement error causes a downward bias when estimating a panel data linear regression model. The panel data context offers various opportunities to derive moment conditions that result in consistent GMM estimators. We consider three sources of moment conditions: (i) restrictions on the intertemporal covariance matrix of the errors in the equations, (ii) heteroskedasticity and nonlinearity in ...

The Easterlin hypothesis emphasizes the effect of relative cohort size on fertility. Models based on the Easterlin hypothesis have performed well in explaining time series fertility data, although these results have been for long historical time series and have typically been restricted to single country studies. These models are not adequate to determine if the hypothesis still holds and if th...

The paper examines how hospital cost efficiency has reacted to extensive horizontal integrations of hospitals and rapid growth of managed care in the US health care industry. Cost efficiency is estimated by using panel data approaches to relax the assumptions for the hospital effects imposed in earlier studies. The paper shows that higher managed care penetration over time is associated with gr...

The paper presents panel data evidence for 13 transition countries on inflation, financial development and growth. It contributes to the growth literature by showing that the transition countries conform to developed country evidence in particular with the strong negative effect of inflation on growth. It also contributes more evidence to the debate on the role of financial development. Once in...

In this paper, we estimate a health care demand function for 18 OECD countries for the period 1972-1995. We consider a demand side approach where health expenditure depend on per capita GDP and the relative price of health care. We use panel data unit root and stationarity tests to characterize our data. Then, we test cointegration between our variables with Kao[16] panel data cointegration tes...

Do Labour Market Institutions Matter? Micro-Level Wage Effects of International Outsourcing in Three European Countries This paper studies the impact of outsourcing on individual wages in three European countries with markedly different labour market institutions: Germany, the UK and Denmark. To do so we use individual level data sets for the three countries and construct comparable measures of...