In this paper, we decompose body mass index (BMI) differences between Turkish immigrants and Germans in West Germany for women and men. We focus on isolating the part of BMI differences that can be explained by differences in observed socioeconomic status from the part attributable to...

This paper proposes a quantile regression estimator for a heterogeneous panel model with lagged dependent variables and interactive effects. The paper adopts the Common Correlated Effects (CCE) approach proposed by Pesaran (2006) and Chudik and Pesaran (2015) and demonstrates that the extension...

This paper investigates the key factors affecting household energy expenditure in Egypt. Based upon the latest 2015 Egyptian HIECS Survey, we develop a quantile regression model with an innovative variable selection approach via Adaptive Lasso Regularization technique to untangle the spectrum of...

This paper studies how variations in tax rates and profitability affect the (unconditional) quantiles of the distribution of the leverage of European foreign owned subsidiaries in the presence of unobserved company characteristics, possibly correlated with their observable dimensions. To achieve...

This paper adds to our understanding of the causes of income inequality across nations by examining the influence of different aspects of gender equality or female empowerment. Whereas the economics of income inequality has been an area of active academic inquiry, the role of gender equality has...

Cultural factors and especially common languages are well-known determinants of trade. By contrast, the knowledge of foreign languages was not explored in the literature so far. We combine traditional gravity models with data on fluency in the main languages used in EU and candidate countries....

We revisit and extend the study by Chordia et al. (2014) which documents that, in recent years, increased liquidity has significantly decreased exploitable returns of capital market anomalies in the US. Using a novel international dataset of arbitrage portfolio returns for four well-known...

The use of height data to measure living standards is now a well-established method in the economic literature, and heights are related with vitamin D. Although African-Americans and whites have the genetic ability to reach similar terminal statures, 19th century blacks were consistently shorter...

Using a source of 19th century US state prison records, this study addresses European-American stature variation. The most commonly cited sources for stature variation are diets, disease, and work effort. However, vitamin D is also vital in human statures and health. This paper demonstrates that...

Gravity as both fact and theory is one of the great success stories of recent research on international trade, and has featured prominently in the policy debate over Brexit. We first review the facts, noting the overwhelming evidence that trade tends to fall with distance. We then introduce some...