Eric S. Lin

Military Spending and Inequality: Panel Granger Causality Test

The relationship between military spending and economic inequality is not well documented within the empirical literature, while numerous studies have uncovered the linkages between military spending and other macroeconomic variables, such as economic growth, unemployment, purchasing power parity, black market premium, poverty and investment. The purpose of this article is to examine the causal relationship between military spending and inequality using BVC and SIPRI data across 58 countries from 1987 to 1999. Panel unit root tests indicate that two inequality measures (Theil and EHII) under consideration are likely to be non-stationary. The authors’ work addresses the adverse implications of modeling with non-stationary variables, since this omission casts serious doubt on the reliability of the relationship between military spending and inequality. The recently developed panel Granger non-causality tests provide no evidence to support the causal relationship in either direction between the military spending and the change in economic inequality. The results are consistently robust to alternative data sources for military spending, to alternative definitions of the inequality measures, to the log transformation of the military spending, to the deletion of some data points, and to the division of OECD and non-OECD countries. Finally, the impulse responses and variance decompositions based on the panel vector autoregressive regression model are consistent with the findings from Granger non-causality tests.

MILITARY EXPENDITURE AND UNEMPLOYMENT RATES: GRANGER CAUSALITY TESTS USING GLOBAL PANEL DATA

This paper investigates the empirical relationships between military expenditure and unemployment rates. A set of global panel data on 46 countries is utilized, and a panel data version of the Granger causality test is applied. The results indicate that there is little evidence of the causality running from unemployment to military expenditure regardless of how we measure military spending and determine group countries. In contrast, the causality running from military expenditure to unemployment receives empirical support if military expenditure is measured in terms of its share of GDP and if data are taken from middle‐ and low‐income countries or non‐OECD countries.

Does Military Spending Crowd Out Social Welfare Expenditures? Evidence from a Panel of OECD Countries

This article examines the relationship between defense and social welfare expenditures using a panel of 29 OECD countries from 1988 to 2005. It is quite difficult to take into account the simultaneous channels empirically through which the eventual allocation of defense and welfare spending is determined for the guns-and-butter argument. Taking advantage of our collected panel data-set, the panel generalized method of moments method is adopted to control the country-specific heterogeneity and to mitigate the potential simultaneity problem. The main finding of this article suggests a positive trade-off between military spending and two types of social welfare expenditures (i.e. education and health spending). One of the reasons may be that the OECD countries are more supportive of the social welfare programs; therefore, when the military spending is increased (e.g. military personnel and conscripts), the government may raise the health and education spending as well.

Lottery expenses and charitable contributions - Taiwan's experience

Individuals’ contributions are affected by their lottery outlays if they consider their spending of lottery funds on charities to be a substitute for or a complement to their direct charitable contributions. This study investigates the effect of lottery outlays on charitable contributions based on the experience of lottery introduction in Taiwan. The estimates reveal that lottery outlays exert a positive effect on charitable contributions while the quantitative impact is significant. This study thus provides evidence ameliorating the pessimistic prospect that people may reduce their direct charitable contributions when they spend more on lotteries. Possible explanations for the positive effect are also discussed.

Does purchasing power parity hold following the launch of the euro? Evidence from the panel unit root test

Using a richer panel data set with more representative price indexes, this article adopts Pesarans (2007) panel unit root test to study the validity of Purchasing Power Parity (PPP) across the eurozone countries both before and after the launch of the euro in 1999. We find that PPP holds before the introduction of the single currency, whereas it fails to hold after 1999. Our result is consistent with the finding in Engel and Rogers (2004) and Rogers (2007) that there is no longer a tendency to support the law of one price following the birth of the euro.

Complementarities of R&D strategies on innovation performance: Evidence from Taiwanese manufacturing firms

AbstractThis paper aims to empirically test the R&D complementarities among three alternative R&D strategies, namely, internal R&D, external R&D and cooperative R&D, under different measures of innovation output. Using a firm-level data set based on the Taiwanese innovation survey (in accordance with CIS 3) conducted in 2003, we are able to compare the R&D activities in this newly-industrialized country with other developed countries. Additionally, we apply a two-step procedure to reduce the endogeneity problem caused by the firms’ choices of strategies to obtain consistent estimators, which can be regarded as a combined method of adoption and productivity approaches. We show that the results of the estimation for R&D complementarities may be biased upwards or downwards if we do not include selection equations in the empirical models, thereby giving rise to endogeneity problems. Our empirical results generally support the existence of R&D complementarities, while the strength of complementary effects may ...

Country Survey: Defense Policy and Military Spending in Taiwan, 1952–2009

In this article we survey military spending, the evolution of national defense policy, and the role that defense spending played in economic activities in Taiwan from 1952 to 2009. With the ongoing cross-Strait dialogue and closer commercial ties between Taiwan and China, the share of military spending in government expenditures (or GDP) has tended to gradually decline, which is in accordance with the change in defense policy from an offensive posture to a defensive-oriented attitude. In addition, we investigate the defense spending–inflation nexus in Taiwan. The multivariate structural change test identifies two break points and three regimes are categorized accordingly. The Granger causality test based on the VAR model reveals that the heavy defense burden in Taiwan during 1952–71 (the first regime) is essentially an important factor causing the higher price levels. However, when the tension across the Taiwan Strait is alleviated as well as the defense-oriented policy adopted, the military spending no longer plays a crucial role in determining inflation in the recent two regimes. Sensitivity analysis confirms that our results are robust to different model specifications.

Finite-Sample Refinement of GMM Approach to Nonlinear Models Under Heteroskedasticity of Unknown Form

ABSTRACT It is quite common to observe heteroskedasticity in real data, in particular, cross-sectional or micro data. Previous studies concentrate on improving the finite-sample properties of tests under heteroskedasticity of unknown forms in linear models. The advantage of a heteroskedasticity consistent covariance matrix estimator (HCCME)-type small-sample improvement for linear models does not carry over to the nonlinear model specifications since there is no obvious counterpart for the diagonal element of the projection matrix in linear models, which is crucial for implementing the finite-sample refinement. Within the framework of nonlinear models, we develop a straightforward approach by extending the applicability of HCCME-type corrections to the two-step GMM method. The Monte Carlo experiments show that the proposed method not only refines the testing procedure in terms of the error of rejection probability, but also improves the coefficient estimation based on the mean squared error (MSE) and the mean absolute error (MAE). The estimation of a constant elasticity of substitution (CES)-type production function is also provided to illustrate how to implement the proposed method empirically.

Measuring the Impact of Military Spending: How Far Does a DSGE Model Deviate from Reality?

Dunne, Smith, and Willenbockel (2005) argue that the mainstream growth literature has not found military spending to be a significant determinant of economic growth, yet much of the defense economics literature has noted significant effects. This paper revisits this issue by using a DSGE-VAR approach, combining both theoretical and empirical methods. We present that the DSGE approach (estimated with the Bayesian technique) and the Bayesian VAR with the Minnesota Prior both lead to worse in-sample fit than our proposed DSGE-VAR framework. The DSGE-VAR approach reveals that a positive military spending shock boosts the U.S. economy, increasing per capita real GDP growth, consumption, inflation and interest rate. Our results are robust to alternative model specifications. Future investigations such as exploring an optimal military spending policy could adopt the approach in this paper to determine the best model – empirical, theoretical, or a combination of the two.

Performance and Compensation: Evidence from Postseason Participation in Major League Baseball

This study applies a dynamic panel estimation approach to analyze postseason playoff participation in Major League Baseball (MLB) based on 1985-2013 MLB seasonal data. Our findings suggest that a teams payroll exhibits an important role in predicting playoff participation. Inter-team payroll disparity has a stronger effect than intra-team salary disparity on increasing the chance of entering the playoffs. We also examine whether there is any persistency of postseason playoffs in MLB, finding that the chance of entering the playoffs in a current season does not depend on a teams winning status in the previous season.