This paper studies the effects of increasing formality via tax reduction and simplification schemes on micro-firm performance. It uses the 1997 Brazilian SIMPLES program. We develop a simple theoretical model to show that SIMPLES has an impact only on a segment of the micro-firm population, for...

This paper develops an instrumental variables estimator for quantile regression in panel data with fixed effects. Asymptotic properties of the instrumental variables estimator are studied for large N and T when Na/T ! 0, for some a 0. Wald and Kolmogorov-Smirnov type tests for general linear...

This paper studies the connections among quantile regression, the asymmetric Laplace distribution, maximum likelihood and maximum entropy. We show that the maximum likelihood problem is equivalent to the solution of a maximum entropy problem where we impose moment constraints given by the joint...