According to Gibrat's Law of Proportionate Effect, the growth rate of a given firm is independent of its size at the beginning of the examined period. Aimed at extending this line of investigation, the present paper uses quantile regression techniques to test whether Gibrat's Law holds for new...

Summary A common assumption in supervised learning is that the training and test input points follow the same probability distribution. However, this assumption is not fulfilled, e.g., in interpolation, extrapolation, active learning, or classification with imbalanced data. The violation of this...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to introduce the special issue on “Disadvantaged workers in the labour market” and to draw some policy implications that are common to the studies included in the special issue. Design/methodology/approach – The paper introduces several econometric...

The t-test of an individual coefficient is used widely in models of qualitative choice. However, it is well known that the t-test can yield misleading results when the sample size is small. This paper provides some experimental evidence on the finite sample properties of the t-test in models...

We use firm-level data from Italian manufacturing firms to assess the relationship between various types of R&D and total factor productivity growth, including collaborative research with other firms and universities. A novel twist to our empirical analysis is that we estimate a sample selection...

The concept of a consideration set has become a central concept in the study of consumer behavior. This paper shows that the common practice of estimating models using only the set of alternatives deemed to be in the set considered by a consumer will usually result in estimated parameters that...

Hausman (1978) developed a widely-used model specification test that has passed the test of time. In this paper, we show that the asymptotic variance of the difference of the two estimators can be a singular matrix. Three illustrative examples are used, namely an exogeneity test for the linear...

This paper evaluates the impact of underwriting decision on fair lending risk assessments of loan pricing. Using data from one national bank that contain a rich set of decisioning variables, we compare the estimation results from the single equation model with those from the sample selection...

Deregulation in the electric power industry has been aimed at promoting competition and thereby enhancing the industry’s efficiency. We use the auction data of public power procurements to study the impact of the reform on the retail power market in Japan. We quantify this impact by measuring...