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 variable selection procedure based on the shrinkage estimation technique for a categorical varying-coefficient model. We apply the method to identify the relevant determinants for body mass index (BMI) from a large amount of potential factors proposed in the...

In this paper, we consider a partially linear panel data model with cross-sectional dependence and non-stationarity. Meanwhile, we allow fixed effects to be correlated with the regressors to capture unobservable heterogeneity. Under a general spatial error dependence structure, we then establish...

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...