Offering a unifying theoretical perspective not readily available in any other text, this innovative guide to econometrics uses simple geometrical arguments to develop students' intuitive understanding of basic and advanced topics, emphasizing throughout the practical applications of modern theory and nonlinear techniques of estimation. One theme of the text is the use of artificial regressions for estimation, reference, and specification testing of nonlinear models, including diagnostic tests for parameter constancy, serial correlation, heteroscedasticity, and other types of mis-specification. Explaining how estimates can be obtained and tests can be carried out, the authors go beyond a mere algebraic description to one that can be easily translated into the commands of a standard econometric software package. Covering an unprecedented range of problems with a consistent emphasis on those that arise in applied work, this accessible and coherent guide to the most vital topics in econometrics today is indispensable for advanced students of econometrics and students of statistics interested in regression and related topics. It will also suit practising econometricians who want to update their skills. Flexibly designed to accommodate a variety of course levels, it offers both complete coverage of the basic material and separate chapters on areas of specialized interest.

Estimation and Inference in Econometrics

The East Asian miracle: Economic growth and public policy: By the World Bank. (New York: Oxford University Press for the World Bank, 1993. 389 pp. $19.95, paper.)

The role of improved schooling, a central part of most development strategies, has become controversial because expansion of school attainment has not guaranteed improved economic conditions. This paper reviews the role of cognitive skills in pro- moting economic well-being, with a particular focus on the role of school quality and quantity. It concludes that there is strong evidence that the cognitive skills of the population—rather than mere school attainment—are powerfully related to indi- vidual earnings, to the distribution of income, and to economic growth. New empiri- cal results show the importance of both minimal and high level skills, the comple- mentarity of skills and the quality of economic institutions, and the robustness of the relationship between skills and growth. International comparisons incorporating expanded data on cognitive skills reveal much larger skill deficits in developing coun - tries than generally derived from just school enrollment and attainment. The mag- nitude of change needed makes clear that closing the economic gap with developed countries will require major structural changes in schooling institutions.

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The Role of Cognitive Skills in Economic Development

Africa has had slow growth and a massive exodus of capital. In many respects it has been the most capital-hostile region. We review and interpret the aggregate-level and microeconomic literatures to identify the key explanations for this performance. There is a reasonable correspondence of the two sets of evidence, pointing to four factors as being important. These are a lack of openness to international trade; a high-risk environment; a low level of social capital; and poor infrastructure. These problems are to a substantial extent attributable to government behavior, and the paper includes a review of the political economy literature addressing that behavior.

Explaining African Economic Performance

This paper proposes a new mechanism linking trade and wage inequality in developing countries – the quality-upgrading mechanism – and investigates its empirical implications in panel data on Mexican manufacturing plants. In a model with heterogeneous plants and quality-differentiated goods, only the most productive plants in a country like Mexico enter the export market, they produce higher-quality goods to appeal to richer Northern consumers, and they pay high wages to attract and motivate a high-quality workforce. An exchange-rate devaluation leads initially more-productive, higher-wage plants to increase exports, upgrade quality, and raise wages relative to initially less-productive, lower-wage plants within each industry. Using the late-1994 peso crisis as a source of variation and a variety of proxies for plant productivity, I find that initially more-productive plants increased the export share of sales, white-collar wages, blue-collar wages, the relative wage of white-collar workers, and ISO 9000 certification more than initially less-productive plants during the peso crisis period, and that these differential changes were greater than in periods without devaluations before and after the crisis period. A factor-analytic strategy that relies more heavily on the theoretical structure and avoids the need to construct proxies finds similar results. These findings support the hypothesis that differential quality upgrading induced by the exchange rate shock tended to increase within-industry wage inequality.

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Trade, Quality Upgrading, and Wage Inequality in the Mexican Manufacturing Sector

Since the seminal contribution of Gregory Mankiw, David Romer and David Weil (1992), the growth empirics literature has used increasingly sophisticated methods to select relevant growth determinants in estimating cross-section growth regressions. The vast majority of empirical approaches however limit cross-country heterogeneity in production technology to the specification of Total Factor Productivity, the 'measure of our ignorance' (Abramowitz, 1956). The central theme of this survey is an investigation
of this choice of specification against the background of pertinent data properties when the units of observations are countries or regions and the time-series dimension of the data becomes substantial. We present two general empirical frameworks for cross-country productivity analysis and demonstrate that they encompass the approaches in the growth empirics literature of the past two decades. We then develop our central argument, that cross-country heterogeneity in the impact of observables and unobservables on output is important for reliable empirical analysis. This idea is developed against the background of the pertinent time-series and cross-section properties of macro panel data.

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Econometrics for grumblers: a new look at the literature on cross-country growth empirics

Despite the widely recognised importance of the manufacturing industry for successful development few studies investigate this sector in cross-country analysis. We fill this gap in the literature by analysing manufacturing production across a large number of developing and developed economies. Our empirical framework allows for heterogeneous production technology and accounts for endogeneity as well as cross-section dependence in the panel. Our results imply that differences in production technology are of crucial importance for understanding cross-country differences in labour productivity and their underlying causes. In the light of these findings the interpretation of regression intercepts as TFP level estimates collapses and we introduce an alternative measure which is robust to parameter heterogeneity.

Productivity analysis in global manufacturing production

We investigate the question whether firms in the manufacturing sector in Africa are credit constrained. The fact that few firms obtain credit is not sufficient to prove constraints, since certain firms may not have a demand for credit while others may be refused credit as part of profit maximising behaviour by banks. To investigate this question, we use direct evidence on whether firms had a demand of credit and whether their demand was satisfied in the formal credit market, based on panel data on firms in the manufacturing sector from six African countries. More than half the firms in the sample had no demand for credit. Of those firms with a demand for credit, only a quarter obtained a formal sector loan. In line with expectations, our analysis suggests that banks allocate credit on the basis of expected profits. However, controlling for credit demand, outstanding debt is positively related with obtaining further lending while micro or small firms are less likely to get a loan than large firms. The latter effect is strong and present in the regression, despite including several variables typically referred to as explaining why small or ‘informal’ firms do not get credit. The role of outstanding debt is likely to be a reflection of inefficiency in credit markets, while the fact that size matters is consistent with a bias as well, although we cannot totally exclude that they reflect transactions costs on the part of banks. Finally, we could not detect any differences between countries in the effects of these factors in the credit allocation rule, although financial deepening is found to explain most of the country-specific fixed effects, shifting the probability of obtaining credit across the firm distribution.

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Credit Constraints in Manufacturing Enterprises in Africa

We use firm-level panel data for the manufacturing sector in four African countries to investigate whether exporting impacts on efficiency, and whether efficient firms self-select into the export market. Based on simultaneous estimation of a production function and an export regression, our preferred results indicate significant efficiency gains from exporting, which can be interpreted as learning by exporting. We show that modelling unobserved heterogeneity by a flexible approach is important for deriving this conclusion. A policy implication of our results is that Africa would gain from orientating its manufacturing sector towards exporting.

Francis Teal

Papers

Econometrics for grumblers: a new look at the literature on cross-country growth empirics

Productivity analysis in global manufacturing production

Credit Constraints in Manufacturing Enterprises in Africa

Do African Manufacturing Firms Learn from Exporting

Size and efficiency in African manufacturing firms: evidence from firm-level panel data