The Easterlin hypothesis emphasizes the effect of relative cohort size on fertility. Models based on the Easterlin hypothesis have performed well in explaining time series fertility data, although these results have been for long historical time series and have typically been restricted to single country studies. These models are not adequate to determine if the hypothesis still holds and if th...

Do Labour Market Institutions Matter? Micro-Level Wage Effects of International Outsourcing in Three European Countries This paper studies the impact of outsourcing on individual wages in three European countries with markedly different labour market institutions: Germany, the UK and Denmark. To do so we use individual level data sets for the three countries and construct comparable measures of...

Intergenerational Mobility: Trends Across the Earnings Distribution The analysis, based on register data for Norwegian cohorts born 1950, 1955, and 1960, shows that the intergenerational earnings mobility is high. Using quantile regression, mobility is found to be lower at the lower end of the earnings distribution than at the upper end. The findings also indicate that mobility increases over t...

This paper extends the transformed maximum likelihood approach for estimation of dynamic panel data models by Hsiao, Pesaran, and Tahmiscioglu (2002) to the case where the errors are cross-sectionally heteroskedastic. This extension is not trivial due to the incidental parameters problem and its implications for estimation and inference. We approach the problem by working with a mis-speci…ed ho...

We develop a horizontal R&D growth model that allows us to investigate the different channels through which financial reforms affect investment and patent activity. First, “micro” reform abolishes barriers entry in banking sector produces straightforward result: decrease lending rates stimulates economic growth. Second, “macro” removes restrictions on banks’ reserves credit controls. While this...

This paper investigates the impact of stock markets and banks on economic growth using a panel data set for the period 1976-98 and applying recent GMM techniques developed for dynamic panels. On balance, we find that stock markets and banks positively influence economic growth and these findings are not due to potential biases induced by simultaneity, omitted variables or unobserved country-spe...

This paper discusses inference about the pre and post break value of a scalar parameter in GMM time series models with a single break at an unknown point in time. We show that treating the break date estimated by least squares as the true break date leads to substantially oversized tests and confidence intervals unless the break is large. We develop an alternative test that controls size unifor...

In this paper, by employing the Generalized Method of Moment (GMM) techniques and Chinese provincial level data from 1991 to 2003, we empirically investigate the relationship between finance and growth in post-reform China. We find that financial development significantly promotes economic growth in coastal regions but not in inland regions; the weak finance-growth nexus in inland provinces has...

The present contribution tests whether countries can be pooled when studying the financegrowth nexus. Overall, our results point toward a ‘pragmatic’ positive answer, though considerable heterogeneity is present among developing countries. JEL codes: C23, O16