This paper investigates the determinants of involuntary insolvency and acquisition in UK small and medium-sized companies. Using a competing risks model and data from the survey database of the ESRC CBR at the University of Cambridge, we draw specific attention to the impact of managerial...

Using data over a 34-year span on UK quoted firms, this paper seeks to identify the factors that increase the likelihood of exit of firms. Firms may disappear through the mutually precluding events of bankruptcies and acquisitions. We use a competing-risks hazard model to determine...

This paper describes a simple extension of popular tests of equality of hazard rates in a two-sample or k-sample setup to a situation where the covariate under study is continuous. In other words, we test the null hypothesis that the hazard does not depend on the value of the covariate against...

Firms exit through the mutually precluding events of bankruptcy and acquisition. We use a competing risks hazard regression model to identify the characteristics leading to each of these two outcomes using over thirty years of data on US and UK quoted firms. We find evidence about the way in...

Notions of monotone ordering with respect to continuous covariates in duration data regression models have recently been discussed, and tests for the proportional hazards model against such alternatives have been developed (Bhattacharjee and Das, 2002). Such monotone/ ordered departures are...

In an article published in Development and Change in 2011, I suggested an alternative measure of inequality to the Gini - a "19th Century statistic" - which has subsequently become known as the ´Palma Ratio'. In this new article, I revisit the argument for such a measure. Using new data, I...

The South African government has set as a policy objective the halving of poverty by 2014, although the meaning of this goal has not yet been defined. This article frames government’s stated target of halving poverty by 2014 in terms of specific measures of the poverty gap and poverty...

We describe Amartya Sen's Capability Approach to welfare evaluation in the language of standard welfare economics, and assess to what extent it provides a genuine alternative for individual welfare measurement and policy evaluation. We review the nascent empirical literature on the capability...

This paper introduces the concepts of time-specific weak and strong cross section dependence. A double-indexed process is said to be cross sectionally weakly dependent at a given point in time, t, if its weighted average along the cross section dimension (N) converges to its expectation in...

This paper considers testing the hypothesis that errors in a panel data model are weakly cross sectionally dependent, using the exponent of cross-sectional dependence <img src="http://www.econ.cam.ac.uk/faculty/pesaran/wp12/image3.png" width="11" height="13" />, introduced recently in Bailey, Kapetanios and Pesaran (2012). It is shown that the implicit null of the <em>CD</em> test depends on the...