This paper discusses some problems possibly arising when approximating via Monte-Carlo simulations the distributions of goodness-of-fit test statistics based on the empirical distribution function. We argue that failing to re-estimate unknown parameters on each simulated Monte-Carlo sample —...

We use a factor model to detect the presence of economy-wide underlying forces leading firm growth. By using quarterly firm level data on 660 US firms for 20 years, we find evidence of a unique common factor explaining approximately one fifth of the variance of firm growth rates. We investigate...

This paper explores the statistical properties of household consumption-expenditure budget share distributions – defined as the share of household total expenditure spent for purchasing a specific category of commodities – for a large sample of Italian households in the period 1989–2004....

The procedure proposed by Bai and Ng (2002) for identifying the number of factors in static factor models is revisited. In order to improve its performance, we introduce a tuning multiplicative constant in the penalty, an idea that was proposed by Hallin and Liska (2007) in the context of...

<Para ID="Par1">This study analyses the effect of R&D expenditure on firm employment growth in the medium term, using six cross-sectional waves of an innovation survey conducted in the Netherlands in all sectors. The analysis is focused on firms having positive R&D expenditure and investigates whether higher...</para>

This paper discusses the effects of the existence of natural and/or exogenously imposed thresholds in firm size distributions on estimations of the relation between firm size and the variance in firm growth rates. We argue that these estimations are upwardly biased whenever the threshold...

The aim of this paper is to understand what economic mechanisms may cause the Law of Proportionate Effect to break down for fast-growing and shrinking firms. Recent evidence has highlighted that the first-order coefficients of quantile auto-regression of firm size decline across quantiles. Our...

C<sc>apasso</sc> M., C<sc>usmano</sc> L. and M<sc>orrison</sc> A. The determinants of outsourcing and offshoring strategies in industrial districts: evidence from Italy, <italic>Regional Studies</italic>. Outsourcing has increasingly become a distinguished feature of the recent evolution of industrial districts and it constitutes the...

Information and communication technologies (ICT) are spreading fast across Latin America and the Caribbean. This trend has brought about important economic and social changes, which have largely gone unmeasured until recently. Here, analysts from the United Nations Economic Commission for Latin...