In the run-up to the financial crisis, the world economy was characterized by large and growing current account imbalances. Since the onset of the crisis, the People's Republic of China and the United States have rebalanced. As a share of gross domestic product, their current account imbalances...

Recent research has repeatedly demonstrated that well-being typically evinces precipitous deterioration close to the end of life. However, the determinants of individual differences in these terminal declines are not well understood. In this study, we examine the role of perceived personal...

This volume was prepared by Benedikt Heid while he was working at the ifo Institute and the University of Bayreuth. It was completed in December 2013 and accepted as a doctoral thesis by the Department of Economics at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München. It includes six self-contained...

This volume was prepared by Benedikt Heid while he was working at the ifo Institute and the University of Bayreuth. It was completed in December 2013 and accepted as a doctoral thesis by the Department of Economics at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München. It includes six self-contained...

Does financial health shore up firm productivity? This paper empirically investigates this question and presents productivity as another driving factor in translating financial development into real economic progress. Our empirical framework employs Levinsohn and Petrin's (2003) semi-parametric...

The paper studies empirically how relative supply and demand conditions on the capital market affected US firm-level investment over the business cycles from 1977 to 2011. A dynamic econometric specification of capital accumulation including sales growth, Tobin's q, the cash flow-capital ratio...

With the advent of globalization, economic and financial interactions among countries have become widespread. Given technological advancements, the factors of production can no longer be considered to be just labor and capital. In the pursuit of economic growth, every country has sensibly...

While it seems evident that occupations affect health, effect estimates are scarce. We use a job characteristics matrix in order to characterize occupations by their physical and psychosocial burden in German panel data spanning 26 years. Employing a dynamic model to control for factors that...

After severe disasters, persons living not only in the directly affected areas, but also in distant areas could be seriously affected thorough images of the disaster on television and in newspapers. Hence, it can be difficult to define qualified beneficiaries for policy compensation in terms of...

This study examines the fungibility of foreign aid and makes three contributions to the existing literature. Firstly, fungibility of aid at the aggregate level is reexamined on a richer panel dataset of 91 developing countries for 1980-2009, taking into account endogeneity of aid and...

We investigate the cyclicality of the private savings to GDP ratio for a panel of 19 OECD countries over the period 1971-2009. We find robust evidence that the private savings ratio is countercyclical. Three theories unambiguously predict a higher private savings ratio during recessions: a...

An autoregressive fixed effects panel data equation in error-ridden endogenous and exogenous variables, with finite memory of disturbances, latent regressors and measurement errors is considered. Finite sample properties of GMM estimators are explored by Monte Carlo (MC) simulations. Two kinds...

The Generalized Method of Moments (GMM) is discussed for handling the joint occurrence of fixed effects and random measurement errors in an autoregressive panel data model. Finite memory of disturbances, latent regressors and measurement errors is assumed. Two specializations of GMM are...

A system of regression equations (SURE) for analyzing panel data with random heterogeneity in intercepts and coefficients, and unbalanced panel data is considered. A Maximum Likelihood (ML) procedure for joint estimation of all parameters is described. Since its implementation for numerical...

The paper presents the Ukrainian Longitudinal Monitoring Survey (ULMS), which is one of the most widely used household and labor force surveys in Eastern Europe. It is based on a statistically representative sample of the Ukrainian population aged between 15 and 72 years, comprising about 4,000...

This paper investigates the link between unemployment and external trade in Germany, using data on unemployment, international trade and economic activity for the 16 German federal states (Länder). With panel data econometrics we show that international trade as measured by state-wise trade...

This paper proposes a new semi-nonparametric maximum likelihood estimation method for estimating production functions. The method extends the literature on structural estimation of production functions, started by the seminal work of Olley and Pakes (1996), by relaxing the scalar-unobservable...

This paper has been accepted for publication in the 'Review of Economics and Statistics'.We propose a dynamic factor model for mixed-measurement and mixed-frequency panel data. In this framework time series observations may come from a range of families of parametric distributions, may be...

This paper presents a multidimensional empirical analysis of firm growth. Exploiting census data on Italian manufacturing firms, 1989-1997, we estimate a reduced-form VAR to analyze the co-evolution of employment growth, sales growth, growth of profits and labour productivity growth. Our main...

This paper concerns estimating parameters in a high-dimensional dynamic factormodel by the method of maximum likelihood. To accommodate missing data in theanalysis, we propose a new model representation for the dynamic factor model. Itallows the Kalman filter and related smoothing methods to...

The system GMM estimator for dynamic panel data models combines moment conditions for the model in first differences with moment conditions for the model in levels. It has been shown to improve on the GMM estimator in the first differenced model in terms of bias and root mean squared error....

The link between income inequality and governmental redistribution is still subject to intense research and debate. Starting with the median-voter-hypothesis, a plethora of theoretical models have been developed during the last three decades to identify and explain possible causal relationships....

Die Längsschnittstudie SOEP - ein Haushaltspanel - wurde am Anfang der 80er Jahre überaus gründlich vorbereitet (vgl. die Beiträge von Krupp und von Schäfers, in diesem Heft, sowie Hanefeld 1987). So hat es dem SOEP dann nicht geschadet, dass es Anfang der 90er Jahre nicht mit einem...

Haushaltspanels wurden weltweit vorwiegend zu dem Zweck begonnen, die Dynamik der Einkommensverteilung und -armut abzubilden; die erste Panelstudie, die 1968 begonnene PSID, führt diesen Aspekt sogar im Namen: Panel Study of Income Dynamics. Entsprechend liegen sehr viele Veröffentlichungen...

Die Daten des Sozio-oekeonomischen Panels (SOEP) werden seit 1984 auf Grundlage eines mit dem Befragungsinstitut Infratest abgestimmten Erhebungskonzepts jährlich erhoben. Erfasst werden die Daten zentral in München bei TNS Infratest, aufbereitet in München und beim DIW Berlin, um dann...

In Deutschland gibt es in Teilen der Bevölkerung und der medialen Öffentlichkeit eine große Abneigung gegenüber Erhebungen von individuellen Informationen, die Auskunft über die Lebenslage oder über persönliche Einstellungen geben können. Deshalb überrascht es auch nicht, dass uns die...

Dieser Artikel stellt die Entwicklung des nichtwissenschaftlichen Service für die Nutzer- Innen der SOEP-Mikrodaten dar. Diese Dienstleistung wurde für die Beurteilung eines Projektes vor 25 Jahren noch nicht als besonders wichtig wahrgenommen. Der Übergang des SOEP in eine Einrichtung der...

The SOEP is the second most widely-used household survey worldwide (behind the American PSID), and it is used far beyond the German-speaking world. Partly this widespread usage is due to the helpful translations of the codebooks and variable names and the homogenization of the dataset by the...

In den vergangenen 30 Jahren haben mehrere Industrienationen zunehmend in Entwicklung, Aufbau und Durchführung von sozialwissenschaftlichen Haushalts- und Personenbefragungen investiert, wobei Längsschnitt- und Panelstudien eine besondere Rolle zukommt. In vielen Fällen von der Wissenschaft...

"The biggest strength of the SOEP is, of course, the remarkably high quality of the data ... its continual renewal - adding refresher and additional samples that concentrate on new populations of interest." Wenn ein kritischer Beobachter des SOEP wie Daniel Hamermesh dies sagt (Hamermesh, in...

Auf ein Vierteljahrhundert eigenen Bestehens zurückzublicken, ist für eine Längsschnittsstudie wie das SOEP schon darum ein Grund zum Feiern, weil sicher ist, dass es nicht beim Rückblick bleiben wird, sondern dass neue Schritte in eine vielversprechende Zukunft anspruchsvoller und...

We propose a novel econometric model for estimating and forecasting cross-sections of time-varying conditional default probabilities. The model captures the systematic variation in corporate default counts across e.g. rating and industry groups by using dynamic factors from a large panel of...

Die Daten des Mannheimer Innovationspanels (MIP), einer großen Befragung zum Innovationsverhalten deutscher Unternehmen, stellen eine qualitativ hochwertige Basis für die Politikberatung dar. Der Beitrag zeigt auf, wie die Daten und Ergebnisse der jährlichen Erhebung konkret für die...

The literature that tests for U-shaped relationships using panel data, such as those between pollution and income or inequality and growth, reports widely divergent (parametric and non-parametric) empirical findings. We explain why lack of identification lies at the root of these differences. To...

Measurement of inequity in health care delivery has focused on the extent to which health care utilisation is or is not distributed according to need, irrespective of income. Studies using cross-sectional data have proposed various ways of measuring and standardizing for need, but inevitably...

We model panel data of crime careers of juveniles from a Dutch Judicial Juvenile Institution. The data are decomposed into a systematic and an individual-specific component, of which the systematic component reflects the general time-varying conditions including the criminological climate....

We propose a refinement of the criterion by Bai and Ng [2002] for determining the number of static factors in factor models with large datasets. It consists in multiplying the penalty function times a constant which tunes the penalizing power of the function itself as in the Hallin and Lika...

We show that the use of pooled and panel data in estimating convergence across countries (or other territorial areas) may involve some pitfalls since this type of data cannot properly distinguish between actual convergence and the possibility of decreasing growth rates over time within each...

Using panel data for Peru for the period 1994-2000, we find that when households receive two or more services jointly, the welfare increases of the household, as measured by changes in consumption, are larger than when services are provided separately. Such an increase appears to be more than...

This paper introduces two easy to calculate estimators with desirable properties for theautoregressive parameter in dynamic panel data models. The estimators are (nearly) unbiased andperform satisfactorily even for small samples in either the time-series or cross-section dimension.

The relative magnitudes are compared of successive terms in a higher-order asymptotic expansion of the bias of the LSDV estimator in dynamic panels. We find that the leading term accounts for the major part of the actual bias in small samples. This implies that bias correction procedures can be...

This paper introduces a new estimator for the fixed effects dynamic panel data model withexogenous variables. This estimator does not share some of the drawbacks of recently developed IVand GMM estimators and has a good performance even in small samples. The nearly unbiased estimatoris derived...

The finite sample behaviour is analysed of particular least squares (LS) andmethod of moments (MM) estimators in panel data models with individual effectsand both a lagged dependent variabIe regressor and another explanatory variabIewhich may be affected by lagged feedbacks from the dependent...

A major economic reason for the introduction of the euro was its supposedly positive effect on intra-EMU trade. Existing studies examine this suspicion indirectly using non-EMU data and report ambiguous results. We estimate the euro-effect directly from data that include EMU observations. Using...

The German Socio-Economic Panel (GSOEP) is an interdisciplinary longitudinal study of private households for the representative analysis and interpretation of social and economic behavior in the Federal Republic of Germany. As a longitudinal survey, the GSOEP primarily aims to collect...

Approximation formulae are developed for the bias of ordinary andgeneralized Least Squares Dummy Variable (LSDV) estimators in dynamicpanel data models. Results from Kiviet (1995, 1999) are extended tohigher-order dynamic panel data models with general covariancestructure. The focus is on...

Through Monte Carlo experiments the small sample behavior is examinedof various inference techniques for dynamic panel data models whenboth the time-series and cross-section dimensions of the data set aresmall. The LSDV technique and corrected versions of it are comparedwith IV and GMM...

This paper applies the panel unit root test proposed by Im, Pesaran and Shin (1997) to test for unemployment hysteresis in the US states and the EU countries against the alternative of a natural rate. The results show that hysteresis for the EU and the natural rate for the US states are the most...

In this paper, we use a panel approach to study population growth in major cities around the world. We find that major cities grow faster in relatively backward economies and in more volatile, faster-growing economies. We also find that the effects of trade policy on the growth of major cities...

This chapter reviews developments to improve on the poor performance of the standard GMM estimator for highly autoregressive panel series. It considers the use of the system GMM estimator that relies on relatively mild restrictions on the initial condition process. This system GMM estimator...