Errors in Variables and the Empirics of Economic Growth

Jean-Louis Leslie Arcand () and Dagenais Marcel

No 200536, Working Papers from CERDI

Abstract: We examine cross-sectional empirical evidence on the determinants of economic growth in light of an instrumental variables estimator, based on sample moments of order higher than two, which does not require extraneous instruments and which remains consistent, under quite reasonable assumptions, when measurement errors affect the explanatory variables. We focus on several in‡fluential papers — Barro (1991), Mankiw, Romer, and Weil (1992), Sachs and Warner (1997a), Easterly and Levine (1997), Levine and Zervos (1998)— and find that many of their results are "fragile". We argue that the application of our estimator to cross-sectional empirical studies of the determinants of growth yields important insights which may qualify previous findings in the literature, especially given the errors in variables problems which are known to plague commonly used cross-sectional datasets.

Keywords: economic growth; errors in variables (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2005

Downloads: (external link)
http://publi.cerdi.org/ed/2005/2005.36.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: http://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:cdi:wpaper:841

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from CERDI
Contact information at EDIRC.
Series data maintained by Vincent Mazenod ().