While the growing supply of university skills is known to have agglomerated towards the large centers in Finland, there is no research knowledge available on the development of regional demands. This paper attempts to fill this gap by analyzing regional variation in the private-sector return to...

Using survey based data, we investigate factors influencing credit rationing within a bank-based financial system. We show that rationing depends on various dimensions of the firm-bank relationships and that the effects of relationship lending on rationing are not identical for different firm...

Multilateral development banks (MDBs) have important functions in infrastructure projects. Besides their traditional lending role, they provide additional guarantees to private investors about the creditworthiness of the project. An empirical analysis is performed for the determinants of...

A new uniform expansion is introduced for sums of weighted kernel-based regression residuals from nonparametric or semiparametric models. This expansion is useful for deriving asymptotic properties of semiparametric estimators and test statistics with data-dependent bandwidths, random trimming,...

We consider a general sample selection model where unit and item nonresponse simultaneously affect a regression relationship of interest, and both types of nonresponse are potentially correlated. We estimate both parametric and semiparametric specifications of the model. The parametric...

This paper assesses the relationship between provider ownership and the price of water for residential use set by 386 Southern Spanish municipalities. Our main contribution to the previous literature is that we go much further than merely distinguishing between private and public ownership....