We study entrepreneurs' start-up financing from banks and local financiers. An informal network, whose membership cannot be observed by outsiders, conveys the good signals it gets about the hidden types of network entrepreneurs to local financiers, which are then reflected in different loan...

Inhabitants of houses near Amsterdam Airport are complaining of noise nuisance, caused by aircraft traffic. The usual assumption is that the effect of the externality will be perfectly reflected by house price differentials. This is based on the implicit assumption that there is a...

The conditions under which ordinary least squares (OLS) is an unbiased and consistent estimator of the linear probability model (LPM) are unlikely to hold in many instances. Yet the LPM still may be the correct model or a good approximation to the probability generating process. A sequential...

Discrete-choice models provide a simple way of representing utility-maximizing labor supply decisions in the presence of highly nonlinear and possibly non-convex budget constraints. Thus, it is not surprising that they are so extensively used for ex-ante evaluation of taxbenefit reforms. The...

Several theoretical contributions, starting with McElroy and Horney (1981) and Manser and Brown (1980), have suggested to model household behavior as a Nash-bargaining game. Since then, very few attempts have been made to operationalize cooperative models of household labor supply for policy...

This paper develops a two-sector general equilibrium model in which firms in the primary economy have to create workplaces prior to production and product market competition. For this, we introduce the endogenous sunk cost approach with two-stage decisions of firms from IO in the macro-labor...

Income support for working low income families (the ?working poor?) is on top of the political agenda in Switzerland. The current social assistance system is considered inadequate to support working poor households. Labour unions propose the introduction of a general minimum wage, whereas the...

In this paper we develop a discrete model of optimal taxation of married couples and empirically discuss the optimality of income taxation for this group. To this end, we derive the social welfare function which guarantees that joint taxation of married couples is optimal. We will contrast this...

The Wooldridge method is based on a simple and novel strategy to deal with the initial values problem in the nonlinear dynamic random-effects panel data models. This characteristic of the method makes it very attractive in empirical applications. However, its finite sample performance is not...

A common approach to dealing with missing data is to estimate the model on the common subset of data, by necessity throwing away potentially useful data. We derive a new probit type estimator for models with missing covariate data where the dependent variable is binary. For the benchmark case of...