Suchergebnisse

In empirical studies it often happens that some variables for some units are far away from the other observations in the sample. These extreme observations, or outliers, often have a large impact on the results of statistical analyses conclusions based on a sample with and without these units may differ drastically. While applied researchers tend to be aware of this, the detection of outliers and their appropriate treatment is often dealt with in a rather sloppy manner. One reason for this habit seems to be the lack of availability of appropriate canned programs for robust methods that can be used in the presence of outliers. Our paper intents to improve on this situation by presenting a highly robust method for estimation of the popular linear fixed effects panel data model, and to supply Stata code for it. In an application from the field of the micro-econometrics of international firm activities we demonstrate that outliers can indeed drive results.

Economists and Political scientists have suggested for a long time that democracy and the environment are linked. What they did not analyze in detail is ifthe way in which politicians are elected influences the environment as well. Thescope of this paper is to fill this gap. Using high quality data on a cross section of countries, coming from previous studies, we find strong results suggestingthat politicians in majoritarian systems are less interested in environmental commitments than those in proportional representations. The consequence is thatenvironmental commitments are lower in the former system than in the latter.

In many ountries, the a ommodation of ethni , linguisti and religious diversities is a ma jor hallenge. The s ope of this paper is to attempt to understandwhi h politi al arrangements might fa ilitate inter-ethni ohabitation. It is indeed extremely important to understand whi h ele toral system ould be seen asthe most eÆ ient in redu ing ra ial tensions both in the short and in the longrun. The ore of the work is the study of the ee t that ele toral systems have onra ial tensions but also their intera tive ee ts with de entralization. Using thebest available data ( oming from the International Country Risk Guide) and thete hniques we believe to be the most appropriate (Interval Censored Regression)we nd interesting results: rst, ma joritarian systems seem to be positively relatedto high levels of ethni tensions while proportional representations seem parti ularly appropriate for redu ing su h tensions. Se ond, we nd that presidentialism,is asso iated to lower levels of ra ial tensions. Finally we nd that de entralizationis more eÆ ient under parliamentarism than under presidentialism for allowing abetter ethni ohabitation.JEL CLassi ation: D74, H40, H72

AbstractWe develop a new robust‐to‐outliers dummy estimator that we subsequently apply to investigate the impact of various democratic attributes on foreign direct investment in recent years. We find that democracy has generally a positive impact on foreign direct investment, once outliers are controlled for, but that this relationship is very specific to each host country's characteristics.

Abstract

Abstract
Recent evidence suggests that aid induces migration. This result is nevertheless not very informative from a policy perspective since what counts in terms of welfare consequences is the composition of migration. In this paper we focus on education and study which of skilled or unskilled migration is more sensitive to aid. More specifically we investigate the possible channels through which aid might affect self-selection among international emigrants and find that aid induces positive selection by easing the movement of highly qualified workers. Interestingly, we find that technical cooperation and bilateral aid have a significant influence on skilled migration but do not seem to affect unskilled migration significantly. On the other hand, aid targeted to development enhancement affects both categories but seems to have a larger effect on the former.


JEL codes
F35, F22, C23

AbstractSocial conflicts are a serious obstacle to economic growth in many Latin American societies, affecting economic activity both in the short and the long run. The purpose of this paper is twofold. First, we develop a methodology to estimate the direct, short‐run impact of frequently occurring exponents of local conflicts, such as road blockings, on economic activity. The methodology is based on using high frequency (daily) data to estimate the relation between a proxy for economic activity and the occurrence of road blockings. Careful analysis of impulse‐response functions traces the effect of such local social conflicts on economic activity. This information is combined with the aggregate annual time series relation between gross domestic product (GDP) and the high frequency proxy for economic activity to estimate the direct cost of local social conflicts for the economy as a whole. Second, we apply the proposed methodology to analyse the direct economic costs of road blockings in Bolivia, using detailed daily information for the year 2003. The results show that these costs are large. Stronger institutions are a critical factor in reducing the prevalence of such conflicts and to avoid the huge economic costs that they imply. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

In this paper, we follow the same logic as in Hausman (1978) to create a testing procedure that checks for the presence of outliers by comparing a regression estimator that is robust to outliers (S-estimator), with another that is more e¢ cient but a¤ected by them. Some simulations are presented to illustrate the good behavior of the test for both its size and its power. ; info:eu-repo/semantics/published

From the literature on decentralization, it appears that the fiscal vertical imbalance (i.e. the dependence of sub-national governments on national government revenues to support their expenditures) is somehow inherent to multi-level governments. Using a stylized model we show that this leads to a reduction of the extent of redistributive fiscal policies if the maximal size of government has been reached. To test for this empirically, we use some high quality data from the LIS dataset on individual incomes. The results are highly significant and point in the direction of our theoretical predictions. [Copyright 2008 Elsevier B.V.]