Ano: 2012
Código: WPE – 291
Autores/Pesquisadores:
- Nuno Sobreiray
- Luis C. Nunesz
- Paulo M. M. Rodriguesz
Abstract:
One of the prevalent topics in the economic growth literature is the debate between neoclassical, semi-endogenous and endogenous growth theory for the model that best describes the data. An important part of this discussion can be summarized in three mutually exclusive hypotheses: the constant trend”, level shift” and slope shift” hypothesis. The objective of this paper is to classify countries according to each of these hypotheses and to analyze which of the growth theories seems to be favored. We approach this problem in two-steps: rst, the number and the timing of trend breaks are determined using the approach in Nunes and Sobreira (2010); and second, conditional on the estimated number of breaks, break
dates and coe cients identi ed, a statistical framework is introduced to test for general linear restrictions on the coe cients of the linear disjoint broken trend model. Here, we prove a general result that, under certain conditions, a standard F-statistic to test for additional parameter restrictions, given the rst step estimated partition, converges asymptotically in distribution to the usual chi-square distribution. We further show how the aforementioned hypotheses can be formulated as linear restrictions on the parameters of the breaking trend model and apply
the methodology to per capita output of an extensive list of countries. All of our tests are robust as to whether the data are I(0) or I(1) surpassing technical and methodological concerns on previous empirical evidence.