tourism industry has been the fastest and the most income-generating industry in the first decade of the third millennium. it has been for many countries including some of oic member countries a source of foreign exchange and contributed into their development. in this paper, we try to test empirically whether tourism expansion has had any significant effect on economic growth of oic member cou...

This paper presents and describes a large, monthly frequency, macroeconomic database with the goal of establishing a convenient starting point for empirical analysis that requires ”Big Data.” The dataset mimics the coverage of those already used in the literature but has three appealing features. First, it is designed to be updated in real-time using the FRED database. Second, it will be public...

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 suggests a new semi-parametric multivariate approach to seasonal adjustment. The primary innovation is to use a large dimensional factor model of cross section dependence to estimate the trend component in the seasonal decomposition of each time series. Because the trend component is speci…ed to capture covariation between the time series, common changes in the level of the time seri...

In this paper I estimate empirical growth models simultaneously considering endogenous regressors and model uncertainty. In order to apply Bayesian methods such as Bayesian Model Averaging (BMA) to dynamic panel data models with predetermined or endogenous variables and fixed effects, I propose a likelihood function for such models. The resulting maximum likelihood estimator can be interpreted ...

Are Youths on Income Support Less Happy? Evidence from Australia The central research question addressed in this paper is how receipt of income support payments affects the well-being of youths. Using 1997-2004 panel data from a nationally representative survey of Australian youths, we attempt to estimate the size of the welfare stigma faced by Australian youths, where stigma is defined as the ...

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...