Economists have either avoided or struggled with the concept of culture and its role in economic development. Although a few theoretical works -- and even fewer empirical studies -- have appeared in the past decades, this paper tries to build on a multidisciplinary approach to review the...

In this paper the authors analyze the relationship between personal opinions about the social security system and levels of informal employment using data from a recent household survey carried out in Bulgaria. They compare different indicators of job informality, focusing on the lack of social...

This paper provides a set of new Stata commands for parametric and semiparametric estimation of an extended version of ordered response models that accounts for both sample selection problems and heterogeneity in the thresholds for the latent variable. The standard estimator of ordered response...

We introduce two new Stata commands for the estimation of an or- dered response model with sample selection. The opsel command uses a standard maximum-likelihood approach to fit a parametric specification of the model where errors are assumed to follow a bivariate Gaussian distribution. The...

Understanding the variability of survival probabilities, both between and within cohorts, is important to economists who study life-cycle decisions under uncertainty. In this paper we analyze the subjective probabilities of survival to specific target ages provided by respondents to the Survey...

We introduce two new Stata commands for the estimation of an ordered response model with sample selection. The opsel command uses a standard maximum likelihood (ML) approach to fit a parametric specification of the model where errors are assumed to follow a bivariate Gaussian distribution. The...

There is a wide agreement on the fact that a large informal economy leaves many individuals without social protection and reduces government's tax revenue and social security contributions. However, it remains an open question what really drives informality, namely whether workers are simply...