Motivated by the literature on the finance–growth nexus, this paper explores the mechanisms through which finance affects corporate investments and capital accumulation. We separate the effects of financial conditions from those of financial development. Based on a sample of firms from five...

This research is one of the few attempts to analyze chronic and transient poverty in the Philippines. Results indicate that poverty in the Philippines is largely comprised of chronic poverty with households in rural areas and Mindanao regions being the most affected. Using quantile regressions,...

This paper uses panel data and two welfare indicators, namely per capita expenditure and per capita food expenditure, to determine the frequency that the households enter poverty and food poverty in the Philippines. Unlike other studies, this paper attributes similar factors to explain transient...

Using the product space and the index for product level sophistication, the performance of the Philippines' export basket is analyzed. Results indicate that while currently it has limited options for diversification, the country can still produce sophisticated exports given significant...

This article analyses the dynamics of women's participation in the decisions made in the household by looking at the effects of events that transpired in the recent period. Results suggest that the wife's participation status is positively affected by the presence of parents, either hers or the...

Using a rich survey data collected in the southern part of the Philippines, this paper aims to study the effect of child labor on the child's schooling outcomes. Results indicate that the efficient allocation of time can offset the impact of an increase in the child's work hours. If child labor...

This paper shows that unit labor costs (ulcs), the most widely used measure of competitiveness, can be interpreted as the labor share in output multiplied by a price-adjustment factor. This has three main implications. First, ulcs are not just a technical concept since they embody the social...

This paper evaluates the methodological foundations of some recent attempts to estimate econometrically the degree of market power and the degree of returns to scale in manufacturing. The method discussed is based on estimating the aggregate production function in growth rate form. It is argued,...

This comment raises three main issues about He and Qin's (2004)attempt at modeling investment in the PRC. The first is this author's skepticism about the general applicability of the neoclassical model of investment to the PRC. Second, that their model for business investment, based on the...

This paper shows that previous arguments about the problems in interpreting the coefficients in multiplicative-logarithmic functions, derived from an arbitrary rebasing of the series, are incorrect. In the specific case of the translog production function, the tests for the CES, Cobb-Douglas and...