Empirical research has called for intensive use of disaggregated data. One of the most heavily used data set in studying the corporate behavior and performance in China is Chinese Industrial Enterprises Database. As we will show, this data set suffers from data matching problems as well as...

This article provides an analysis of the microeconomic determinants of household savings behaviour in Morocco both in urban and rural areas. Our descriptive statistics indicate several and relatively similar savings deter-minants in Morocco regardless of the area considered. Then, we estimate...

This empirical study aims to shed light on the dynamic linkages between innovation and efficiency at individual farm level. We use a comprehensive dataset for dairy farms in Germany for the period 1995 to 2010. Based on a directional distance function framework we estimate the changes in...

This paper develops a theoretical model of multinational firms with an internal capital market. Main reasons for the emergence of such a market are tax avoidance through debt shifting and the existence of institutional weaknesses and financial frictions across host countries. The model serves to...

While the government has made various efforts to upgrade health care facilities in Malaysia, these advances will only benefit the people if the facilities or services are utilised by those in need. This issue has highlighted the importance of the equity concept in health care utilisation. This...

This paper considers causal inference and sample selection bias in non-experimental settings in which: (i) few units in the non-experimental comparison group are comparable to the treatment units; and (ii) selecting a subset of comparison units similar to the treatment units is difficult because...

The classical Heckman (1976, 1979) selection correction estimator (heckit) is mis-specified and inconsistent if an interaction of the outcome variable and an explanatory variable matters for selection. To address this specifi cation problem, a full information maximum likelihood estimator and a...

Applied econometrics has recently emphasized the identification of causal parameters for policy analysis. This revolution has yet to fully propagate to the field of regional science. We examine the scope for application of the matching approach – part of the modern applied econometrics toolkit...

We propose a novel selectivity correction procedure to deal with survey attrition, at the crossroads of the "Heckit" and of the bounding approach of Lee (2009). As a substitute for the instrument needed in sample selectivity correction models, we use information on the number of attempts that...

The problem of absenteeism has taken the centre of the stage of public attention when Renato Brunetta, the Public Employment Secretary, launched a reform of the public sector which started with a law on absenteeism. After the law was passed, the first evidence collected showed an average drop of...