Despite its paramount importance in the empirical growth literature, productivity convergence analysis has three problems that have yet to be resolved: (1) little attempt has been made to explore the hierarchical structure of industry-level datasets; (2) industry-level technology heterogeneity...

In this paper we propose a categorical time-varying coefficient translog cost function to estimate technical change and productivity. The primary feature of this model is that each of its coefficients is expressed as a nonparametric function of a categorical time variable, thereby allowing each...

Empirical growth analysis is plagued with three problems — variable selection, parameter heterogeneity and cross-sectional dependence — which are addressed independently from each other in most studies. The purpose of this study is to pro- pose an integrated framework that extends the...