Econometrics Commons^™

The Impact Of Foreign Direct Investment On Labor Market Measures: Evidence From Sub-Saharan Africa, David A. Mayom

Master's Theses

There is scant literature examining the relationship between foreign direct investment (FDI) and labor market measures in Sub-Saharan African (SSA) countries. This paper explores the effect of FDI on the labor market measures using panel data of 48 Sub-Saharan African Countries from 1991 to 2009. The result indicates that FDI has a positive and significant effect on employment implying that an increase in the inflow of FDI is associated with higher employment. Thus, Sub-Saharan African governments should strongly consider poverty alleviation and employment policies that encourage and direct FDI to the industries where it can significantly reduce unemployment.

The Impact Of Offcial Development Assistance On Foreign Direct Investment: Evidence From Vietnam, Hang Pham

Master's Theses

The relationship between Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) and Official Development Assistance (ODA) has not been fully established, nor has its directionality, as evidenced the disagreement among economists. Using existing literature as starting point, I extend its base by examining key causal variables for ODA and FDI within 64 Vietnamese provinces, covering the span from 1998 to 2012. With the most extensive and newest dataset available, I find that ODA attracts more FDI inflows in intermediate term (5year average) and long term (all year average), but not in the short-term. An important policy implication of these results for developing countries, and …

The Curious Case Of Greece: The Impact Of Fiscal Policy Shocks On Key Macroeconomic Variables. A Var Based Approach., Manny Kaliontzakis

Master's Theses

For years, the Vector Autoregressive approach has been the main tool for monetary economics and macroeconomic researchers around the world. Leading central banking figures, academics, and modern economic think tanks have used the approach to determine the effects of interest rate shocks on basic macroeconomic variables such as GDP, industrial production and unemployment rate. Shocking policy variables, such as interest rates or long term bond rates have given economists the ability to run reliable forecasts. The last 20 years have seen a turn in the use of the VAR approach on fiscal policy as well. Even though, in general, previous …

Privatization & Fdi: Examining Growth In Vietnam's Provinces, William T. Clark

Master's Theses

Over the past three decades many developing countries have looked toward privatizing investment markets and relying more on Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) to supply needed capital investment for their emerging private sectors. In their pursuit of foreign capital, developing countries have enacted several changes in economic policy and regulation in hopes of transforming formerly rural and undeveloped countries into highly urbanized centers of global production. This is particularly true for a transitioning economy such as Vietnam, which has seen increasing privatization of industry and investment since the reforms of 1986 known as “Doi Moi.” In this study I …

The Impact Of Migration And Remittances On Children's Education In El Salvador, Philip H. Jakob

Master's Theses

The effect that migrant remittances have on school enrollment is a challenging relationship to empirically define, requiring both an analysis of the circumstances that lead a household member to emigrate from their home and equally, but not always independently, how the family makes investment decisions in the education of one or more of their children. This study presents a new strategy to determine the nature of this relationship for households in El Salvador, using a 2SLS estimation with a wealth-stratified panel constructed from household survey data over a nine-year period. Employing this methodology to estimate the combined effects of both …

Consumption Smoothing And Labor Supply Allocation Decisions: Evidence From Tanzania, Dustin Davis

Master's Theses

This paper tests the hypothesis that agricultural households engage in intermittent wage labor as a way to smooth consumption in the face of idiosyncratic shocks to agricultural income. Using data on agricultural households from the Tanzanian LSMS-ISA National Panel Survey and global commodity price data as a source of plausibly exogenous variation, the sensitivity of wage labor to farm income shocks is estimated. The idiosyncratic shock to post-harvest income is estimated by incorporating pre-harvest information, including local farm-gate prices as instrumented by global commodity prices. The results show that households are more likely to select into wage labor and work …

A Test Of The Household Separation Hypothesis In Rwanda, James E. Anderson

Master's Theses

How does a farm household in rural Africa react when the government decides crop selection? In developing countries, agricultural households strive to optimize a risk mitigating utility function rather than a traditional agricultural production function. These households are termed “non-separated” as their farming efforts are directed towards family food security rather than maximizing agricultural profits. The lack of integration with labor and commodity markets makes these non-separated households difficult to influence with policy initiatives. Various tests for household separation have been developed.

We use a unique dataset from Rwanda to evaluate these separation tests. The data include households forced into …

Rhode Island Current Conditions Index -- May 2015, Leonard Lardaro

The Rhode Island Current Conditions Index

No abstract provided.

Do Footprint-Based Cafe Standards Make Car Models Bigger?, Brianna Marie Jean

Economics

Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) standards have historically been set equal across all manufacturer fleets of the same type. Concerns about varying costs across firms and safety implications of standards that are set homogeneously across firms and models resulted in a policy shift towards footprint-based standards. Under this type of standard, individual car models face targets based on the size of the area between the wheelbase and wheel track, so that larger models face less stringent standards, and manufacturers who make, on average, larger cars will face a lighter fleet standard. Theoretical models have shown that this type of policy …

Economic Growth And Development In Sub-Saharan Africa, Asia, And Latin America: The Impact Of Human Capital, Angui D. Macham

Applied Economics Theses

My thesis is that human capital has been important to growth, but has had differential impact in three areas: Sub-Sahara Africa; Asia; and Latin America. I estimated three regional models to determine the impact of human capital on the growth of gross domestic product (GDP) per capita. Each model was estimated using the pooled OLS approach with a sample of 10 countries within each region. I make use of data from the Penn World Table- international comparisons of production data bank. I found that only the African region had statistically significant coefficients for both physical and human capital. For the …

Averaged Instrumental Variables Estimators, Yoonseok Lee, Yu Zhou

Center for Policy Research

We develop averaged instrumental variables estimators as a way to deal with many weak instruments. We propose a weighted average of the preliminary k-class estimators, where each estimator is obtained using different subsets of the available instrumental variables. The averaged estimators are shown to be consistent and to satisfy asymptotic normality. Furthermore, its approximate mean squared error reveals that using a small number of instruments for each preliminary k-class estimator reduces the finite sample bias, while averaging prevents the variance from inflating. Monte Carlo simulations find that the averaged estimators compare favorably with alternative instrumental-variable-selection approaches when the strength levels …

Downtown Parking Meter Demand In El Paso, Thomas M. Fullerton Jr., E. Pallarez, Adam G. Walke

Border Region Modeling Project

Prior research establishes that the price of parking in the city centre often impacts the decision to travel downtown and the mode of transportation utilized. Other factors that influence the decision to drive and park downtown have received less attention. This study uses time series data to analyse the demand for metered parking spaces in El Paso, Texas, USA. In addition to meter rates, the determinants of demand include personal income, gasoline prices, and the price of a substitute good, parking garage spaces. Because international bridges connect downtown El Paso to neighbouring Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua, Mexico, the impacts of trans-boundary …

Asymptotic Distribution And Finite-Sample Bias Correction Of Qml Estimators For Spatial Dependence Model, Shew Fan Liu, Zhenlin Yang

Research Collection School Of Economics

In studying the asymptotic and finite sample properties of quasi-maximum likelihood (QML) estimators for the spatial linear regression models, much attention has been paid to the spatial lag dependence (SLD) model; little has been given to its companion, the spatial error dependence (SED) model. In particular, the effect of spatial dependence on the convergence rate of the QML estimators has not been formally studied, and methods for correcting finite sample bias of the QML estimators have not been given. This paper fills in these gaps. Of the two, bias correction is particularly important to the applications of this model, as …

Limit Theory For Vars With Mixed Roots Near Unity, Peter C. B. Phillips, Ji Hyung Lee

Research Collection School Of Economics

Limit theory is developed for nonstationary vector autoregression (VAR) with mixed roots in the vicinity of unity involving persistent and explosive components. Statistical tests for common roots are examined and model selection approaches for discriminating roots are explored. The results are useful in empirical testing for multiple manifestations of nonstationarity - in particular for distinguishing mildly explosive roots from roots that are local to unity and for testing commonality in persistence.

Modified Qml Estimation Of Spatial Autoregressive Models With Unknown Heteroskedasticity And Nonnormality, Shew Fan Liu, Zhenlin Yang

Research Collection School Of Economics

In the presence of heteroskedasticity, Lin and Lee (2010) show that the quasi-maximum likelihood (QML) estimator of the spatial autoregressive (SAR) model can be inconsistent as a ‘necessary’ condition for consistency can be violated, and thus propose robust GMM estimators for the model. In this paper, we first show that this condition may hold in certain situations and when it does the regular QML estimator can still be consistent. In cases where this condition is violated, we propose a simple modified QML estimation method robust against unknown heteroskedasticity. In both cases, asymptotic distributions of the estimators are derived, and methods …

Testing Additive Separability Of Error Term In Nonparametric Structural Models, Liangjun Su, Yundong Tu, Aman Ullah

Research Collection School Of Economics

This paper considers testing additive error structure in nonparametric structural models, against the alternative hypothesis that the random error term enters the nonparametric model non-additively. We propose a test statistic under a set of identification conditions considered by Hoderlein, Su and White (2012), which require the existence of a control variable such that the regressor is independent of the error term given the control variable. The test statistic is motivated from the observation that, under the additive error structure, the partial derivative of the nonparametric structural function with respect to the error term is one under identification. The asymptotic distribution …

Specification Test For Panel Data Models With Interactive Fixed Effects, Liangjun Su, Sainan Jin, Yonghui Zhang

Research Collection School Of Economics

In this paper, we propose a consistent nonparametric test for linearity in panel data models with interactive fixed effects. To construct the test statistic, we need to estimate the model under the null hypothesis of linearity and then obtain the restricted residuals. We show that after being appropriately centered and standardized, the test statistic is asymptotically normally distributed both under the null hypothesis and a sequence of Pitman local alternatives. To improve the finite sample performance, we propose a bootstrap procedure to obtain the bootstrap p-values. A small set of Monte Carlo simulations illustrates that our test performs well in …

A General Method For Third-Order Bias And Variance Corrections On A Nonlinear Estimator, Zhenlin Yang

Research Collection School Of Economics

Motivated by a recent study of Bao and Ullah (2007a) on finite sample properties of MLE in the pure SAR (spatial autoregressive) model, a general method for third-order bias and variance corrections on a nonlinear estimator is proposed based on stochastic expansion and bootstrap. Working with concentrated estimating equation simplifies greatly the high-order expansions for bias and variance; a simple bootstrap procedure overcomes a major difficulty in analytically evaluating expectations of various quantities in the expansions. The method is then studied in detail using a more general SAR model, with its effectiveness in correcting bias and improving inference fully demonstrated …

On Time-Varying Factor Models: Estimation And Testing, Liangjun Su, Xia Wang

Research Collection School Of Economics

Conventional factor models assume that factor loadings are fixed over a long horizon of time, which appears overly restrictive and unrealistic in applications. In this paper, we introduce a time-varying factor model where factor loadings are allowed to change smoothly over time. We propose a local version of the principal component method to estimate the latent factors and time-varying factor loadings simultaneously. We establish the limiting distributions of the estimated factors and factor loadings in the standard large N and large T framework. We also propose a BIC-type information criterion to determine the number of factors, which can be used …

A Bayesian Specification Test, Yong Li, Tao Zeng, Jun Yu

Research Collection School Of Economics

A Bayesian test statistic is proposed to assess the model specification after the model is estimated by Bayesian MCMC methods. The proposed approach does not require an alternative model to be specified and is applicable to a variety of models, including latent variable models, structural dynamic choice models, and dynamics stochastic general equilibrium (DSGE) models, for which frequentist methods are difficult to use. The properties of the test statistic are established and its implementation is discussed. The test is easy to use and the test statistic can be calculated from MCMC outputs even when there are latent variables. The method …