In this paper we address the question whether countries on the African continent have lower average growth rates in real GDP per capita than countries in Asia and Latin America. In contrast to previous studies, we do not aggregate the data, nor do we a priori assign countries to clusters....

We examine access to general practitioners, public and private specialists in Italy. We develop a novel model using finite mixtures of probit models that provides a rich and flexible functional form. The mixed distribution is flexible and can accommodate non-normality of response probabilities....

The past decade has witnessed significant advances in the microeconometric analysis of recreation data. In this review, we focus on two areas in which these innovations have been especially prolific: accounting for unobserved preference heterogeneity and controlling for unobserved and possibly...

We examine, in a strategic setting, the broad issue of how retail channel structures--retail monopoly versus retail duopoly--impact a manufacturer's optimal new product design, both in terms of engineering design specifications as well as manufacturer and retailer profits. Our strategic...

Predicting health care utilization is the foundation of many health economics analyses, such as calculating risk-adjustment capitation payments or measuring equity in health care utilization. The most common econometric models of physician utilization are parametric count data models, since the...

One of the main reasons for the slow progress in detecting susceptibility genes in complex diseases may be that the clinical diagnoses used as phenotypes are genetically heterogeneous. The general objective of this paper is to develop a latent class model to identify homogeneous disease...