Budget deficit has been a common fiscal pressure facing Chinese cities since the 1994 fiscal reform. Meanwhile, land lease sales have become a signi?cant o¤-budgetary revenue to local governments since 2003. This paper investigates whether ?nancing budget deficit is an important driving force...

This paper proposes a test for sphericity in a fixed effects panel data model. It uses the Random Matrix Theory based approach of Ledoit and Wolf (2002) to test for sphericity of the error terms in a fixed effects panel model with a large number of cross-sectional units and time series...

In the fixed-effects stochastic frontier model an efficiency measure relative to the best firm in the sample is universally employed. This paper considers a new measure relative to the worst firm in the sample. We find that estimates of this measure have smaller bias than those of the...