Over the past two decades, Ethiopia has made significant progress in key human development indicators. Child mortality and nutrition have improved and primary school enrolments have increased. This study uses longitudinal data of 1813 strong young cohort and 443 of the old cohort - children in...

This thesis presents an econometric methodology for analyzing the impact of market concentration (HHI) on the day rate prices paid by E&P operators for the lease of drilling rigs. It is an extension of the work of Lee (2008), ‘Measuring the Impact of Concentration in the Drilling Rig...

The paper investigates the role of real exchange rate misalignment on long-run growth for a set of ninety countries using time series data from 1980 to 2004. We first estimate a panel data model (using fixed and random effects) for the real exchange rate, with different model specifications, in...

This study analyzes the impact of the introduction of the first sectoral minimum wage in 1997 in the German construction sector on hourly wages and their distribution. The minimum wage was introduced only in certain sub-sectors of the industry and just blue-collar workers were eligible. In the...

Countries' capital account policies might be contagious in the sense that domestic policies are driven by other countries' policies. A model of strategic interactions is developed to show that countries' best response to policy changes elsewhere consists in imitating this policy. Using a spatial...

This paper estimates demand elasticities for the Turkish mobile telecommunication market. In contrast to most other studies, firm level data is used to estimate dynamic panel data models including instrumental variable techniques. Both short- and long-run elasticities are calculated, yielding a...

The Japanese mobile market has recently shown a remarkable growth in the last decade, with more than 106.2 million 3G (3rd Generation, or W-CDMA) subscribers and 4.4 million 2G (2nd Generation, or PDC) as of December 2009. This paper attempts to analyze factors promoting Japanese mobile phone,...

We use panel data consisting of 96 countries and covering the period 1960–2000 to investigate the effects of free trade agreements (FTAs) and hub-and-spoke systems of FTAs on exports. Our empirical results imply an annual growth rate of 5.57% in exports, leading to a doubling of exports after...

Central banks' international reserves have increased significantly in the recent past. While this accumulation has been widely perceived as precautionary savings to prevent financial crises, rising reserves might also endanger monetary and financial stability. This paper sheds new light on the...