Speaker:
Camilla Mastromarco
- Università del Salento
Wednesday, October 15, 2014
at
12:30 PM
Aula E, Palazzo di Economia
Increasing globalization and interconnection among countries generates spatial and
temporal dependence which will affect the production process of each country. Many studies
have analyzed the effect of cross-sectional dependence by using restrictive parametric models.
We use a flexible nonparametric two-step approach on conditional efficiencies to eliminate the
dependence of production inputs/outputs on these common factors. By using a dataset of 44
countries over 1970-2007, we estimate the global frontier and explore the channels under which
Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) and time affect the production process and its components: im-
pact on the attainable production set (input-output space), and the impact on the distribution of
efficiencies. We extend existing methodological tools - flexible non parametric location-scale fron-
tier model - to examine these interrelationships. We emphasize the usefulness of “pre-whitened”
inputs/outputs to obtain more reliable measure of productivity and efficiency to better inves-
tigate the driven forces behind the catching-up productivity process. Furthermore, since the
influence of external factors has been eliminated, our proposed approach mitigates the prob-
lem of endogeneity bias caused by reverse causality between the external factors as FDI and
productivity.