the exchange rate unification is one of the most important instruments of economic adjustment, which is used in many countries. this paper shows the effects of the exchange rate unification on price level (inflation), gross domestic production (gdp), non-oil exports, private conception, government expenditure and stock of money. the data, is used related to the period 1959-2000. to analyze the ...

This paper considers the speci…cation and estimation of social interaction models with network structures and the presence of endogenous, contextual, correlated, and group …xed e¤ects. When the network structure in a group is captured by a graph in which the degrees of nodes are not all equal, the di¤erent positions of group members as measured by the Bonacich (1987) centrality provide addition...

Does Manager Turnover Improve Firm Performance? New Evidence Using Information from Dutch Soccer, 1986-2004 This research examines the impact of manager turnover on firm performance using information from the Dutch soccer league in the period 1986-2004. The advantage of using sports data is that both manager characteristics and decisions and firm outcomes are directly observable. Both differenc...

Does entrepreneurship cause urban economic growth and if so how large is the impact? Empirical analysis of such question is hampered by endogeneity. This paper uses two different sets of variables – the homestead exemption levels in state bankruptcy laws from 1975 and the share of MSA overlaying aquifers to instrument for entrepreneurship and examine urban growth between 1993 and 2002. Despite ...

This paper examines the impact of government guaranteed small business loans on economic growth, and whether government guaranteed loans crowd out new businesses financed through the market. OLS estimates indicate a significant and positive relation between the Small Business Administration’s (SBA) guaranteed loans and metropolitan growth between 1993 and 2002. However, endogeneity hinders caus...

This paper examines the relationship between firm size, competitive strategy and performance, for the long-lived small firm in Scotland. It uses structural modelling to test the hypothesis that small firms need to remain small if they are to be long-lived. In a threeequation simultaneous model, performance, size and the dimensions of the competitive strategy of the firm are jointly determined. ...

Instrumental variables (IV) is a framework for making causal inferences about the effect of a treatment based on an observational study in which there are unmeasured confounding variables. The most common form of IV estimation is two-stage least squares (2SLS), which works well when the outcome of interest is continuous. However, in many policy settings the objective is to estimate the effect o...

This paper proposes a new two stage least squares (2SLS) estimator which is consistent and asymptotically normal in the presence of many weak and irrelevant instruments and heteroskedasticity. In the first stage the estimator uses an adaptive absolute shrinkage and selection operator (LASSO) that selects the relevant instruments with high probability. However, the adaptive LASSO estimates have ...

In 2015, over 7 million Japanese citizens donated a total of ¥165,291,021,000 (approximately 1.5 billion USD) to municipalities in which they did not live in using the “Furusato Nouzei” system, which was developed as a means to revitalize rural areas in the country (Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications). In this paper, I examine this system in two ways. First, I predict the amount of...

This introduction to the R package systemfit is a slightly modified version of Henningsen and Hamann (2007), published in the Journal of Statistical Software. Many statistical analyses (e.g., in econometrics, biostatistics and experimental design) are based on models containing systems of structurally related equations. The systemfit package provides the capability to estimate systems of linear...