The issue of measurement invariance commonly arises in factor-analytic contexts, with methods for assessment including likelihood ratio tests, Lagrange multiplier tests, and Wald tests. These tests all require advance definition of the number of groups, group membership, and offending model...

Using Dutch data we empirically investigate how financing and innovation vary across firm characteristics. We find that when firms face financial constraints, debt financing and innovation choices are not independent of firm characteristics, and R&D slows down. In the absence of financial...

In Sub-Saharan Africa, high-skilled workers are 13 times more likely to migrate than low-skilled ones. This sheer number has fueled fears about “Brain Drain” as only 3% of the population obtains tertiary education. Although migration prospects might give incentives to invest in schooling, it...

Cognitive diagnosis models (CDMs) are an increasingly popular method to assess mastery or nonmastery of a set of fine-grained abilities in educational or psychological assessments. Several inference techniques are available to quantify the uncertainty of model parameter estimates, to compare...

The paper contributes to the growing global VAR (GVAR) literature by showing how global and national shocks can be identified within a GVAR framework. The usefulness of the proposed approach is illustrated in an application to the analysis of the interactions between public debt and real output...

Using the exogenous variability in intergovernmental transfers and hydrocarbon royalties, based on the fiscal regime that prevailed in Argentina from 1988 to 2003, we jointly estimate the effects that changes in these public revenues had on provincial public consumption and debt. When receiving...

For detecting differential item functioning (DIF) between two groups of test takers, their item parameters need to be aligned in some way. Typically this is done by means of choosing a small number of so called anchor items. Here we propose an alternative strategy: the selection of an anchor...

We analyze the extent of the integrated control of the state over privatized firms during the post-privatization decade (1995-2005) in the Czech Republic. During this period the integrated control potential of the state resembled a corporate pyramid. While pyramidal control was not fully...

Understanding the reasons why individuals take risks, particularly unnecessary risks, remains an important question in economics. We provide the first evidence of a powerful connection between happiness and risk-avoidance. Using data on 300,000 Americans, we demonstrate that happier individuals...

In this paper we challenge the view that the oil price has lost its influence on economic activity after the mid-1980s. While we concede that typical VAR models put forward in the literature fail to identify oil price shocks that significantly affect aggregate production, we obtain clearly...