Improving productivity among microenterprises is important, especially in low-income countries where market imperfections are pervasive, and resources are scarce. Relaxing credit constraints can increase the productivity of microenterprises. Using a field experiment involving agricultural...

This paper considers a flexible panel data sample selection model in which (i) the outcome equation is permitted to take a semiparametric, varying coefficient form to capture potential parameter heterogeneity in the relationship of interest, (ii) both the outcome and (parametric) selection...

Credit unions differ in the types of financial services they offer to their members. This paper explicitly models this observed heterogeneity using a generalized model of endogenous ordered switching. Our approach captures the endogenous choice that credit unions make when adding new products to...

Credit risk is crucial to understanding banks' production technology and should be explicitly accounted for when modeling the latter. The banking literature has largely accounted for risk by using ex-post realizations of banks' uncertain outputs and the variables intended to capture risk. This...

In the neoclassical production functions model technical change (TC) is assumed to be exogenous and it is specified as a function of time. However, some exogenous external factors other than time can also affect the rate of TC. In this paper we model TC via a combination of time trend (purely...

The earlier literature either measured management practices in terms of the general management traits or did not account for the effects on firm performance. However, the transformation of the Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems from general to more specific practices, the counteractive...

We analyze the extent to which hospitality firms overuse staff using a production function model which considers firm heterogeneity and accounts for environmental variables in staff use. We decompose overall staff use inefficiency into transient and persistent inefficiency. To do this, we employ...

Who really wins from foreign direct investment (FDI) and by how much? Should winners care about corruption? Building on evidence of heterogeneity in the FDI-growth relationship, we propose a semiparametric model that allows corruption to influence the relationship between the conditioning...

We investigate empirically the existence of a heterogeneous relation between foreign direct investment (FDI) and economic growth across developing countries. We argue that, across countries, differences in institutional quality are correlated with heterogeneous absorptive capacities and hence a...

We characterize the types of interactions between foreign direct investment (FDI) and economic growth, and analyze the effect of institutional quality on such interactions. To do this analysis, we develop a class of instrument-based semiparametric system of simultaneous equations estimators for...