The diffusion of health care technology is influenced by both the total market share of managed care organizations as well as the level of competition among them. This paper differentiates between HMO penetration and competition and examines their relationship to the adoption of cardiac...

This paper proposes and applies a method of moments to estimate dynamic decision models with corner solutions. The method extends previous results by Hotz and Miller (1993) and Pakes (1994), and it allows for unobserved state variables affecting both the continuous choice (interior solution) and...

This paper is the first attempt to estimate commercial banks’ efficiency in the Visegrad region before joining the EU and also to consider differences in efficiency across the countries. Employing Data Envelopment Analysis, we analyze which of the banking sectors is the most efficient and...

We examine the contribution of incremental and radical innovations to total factor productivity (TFP) growth at the firm level. The first part of our analysis is dedicated to the determinants of innovation and reveals two different innovation regimes. On the one hand, radical innovations rely...

This paper considers empirical work relating to models of firm dynamics. We show that a hazard regression model for firm exits, with a modification to accommodate age-varying covariate effects, provides an empirical framework accommodating many of the features of interest in studies on firm...

Based on the significance of a Minimum Variance Portfolio (MVP) for the understanding of dollarization equilibria, a significant strand of the debate concerned with the driving forces behind this phenomenon has focused on analyzing the determinants of the relative volatility of inflation...

The Information and Communication technology(ICT) environment in the economic community of west african states(ECOWAS) has changed sufficiently to warrant re-conceptualization of the earlier initiatives. Notably, many new technologies have emerged, especially in the area of wireless...

In this paper a model of aggregate investment is derived which incorporates fixed investment costs and capital market imperfections on the micro-level. Aggregate investment reacts nonlinearily with respect to aggregate shocks to productivity and liquidity of firms. Employing non-parametric...

Anti-poverty programs often seek to improve their impact by targeting households for assistance according to one or more criteria. Since such targeting criteria are often based upon measurements of welfare in a single time period, they tend to be chosen to provide an indication of the long-run...

Nonlinear filtering techniques and the quasi maximum likelihood estimator (QMLE) are applied to the problem of estimating the parameters of quadratic models for the term structure of interest rates. It is assumed that zero coupon bond yields data have been contaminated by noise, which allows the...