Ilyes Abid

Determinants Effects of Foreign Direct Investment in Middle East and North Africa Region: Panel Cointegration Analysis

This paper aims to investigate the relationship between Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) inflows and their macroeconomic determinants in Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region during the period 1970-2010. Using recent panel data techniques, we take into account the both hypothesis economic dependencies and structural breaks. We find that economic openness, growth rate, economic instability and exchange rate have a long-run impact on FDI inflows in our panel.

Dynamic analysis of the forecasting bankruptcy under presence of unobserved heterogeneity

This paper illustrates the importance of referring to a dynamic approach when forecasting firms bankruptcies, paying a particular attention to French SMEs. Based on Shummay’s (J Bus 74:101–124, 2001), we build a duration model and extend it by incorporating unobservable heterogeneity. Moreover, we resort to a dynamic dichotomous specification in which “right side” censored data are taken into account. We emphasize the complexity of the calculations of integrals that must be implemented and show how to overcome this challenge by applying the Geweke, Hajivassiliou and Keane algorithm which involves the technique of the simulated maximum likelihood. The findings prove that our dynamic approach, which integrates macroeconomic variables and takes account of both random effects and exogenous shocks, provides credible results. Besides, our method provides the predictive content of macroeconomic variables and the unobservable heterogeneity, which is helpful in forecasting firms bankruptcies.