In line with the neoclassical growth model a persistent stream of oil revenues might have a long lasting impact on GDP per capita in oil exporting countries through higher investment activities. This relationship is explored for Iran and the countries of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) using...

Econometric analyses in the happiness literature typically use subjective well-being (SWB) data to compare the mean of observed or latent happiness across samples. Recent critiques show that com-paring the mean of ordinal data is only valid under strong assumptions that are usually rejected by...

The interest rate is generally considered as an important driver of macroeconomic investment. As an innovation, this paper derives the exact shape of the "hysteretic" impact of changes in the interest rate on macroeconomic investment under the scenarios of both certainty and uncertainty. We...

This paper examines gender differences in entrepreneurial performance and their links with start-up capital utilizing a search model and empirical analysis of survey of entrepreneurs from Swaziland. The results show that entrepreneurs of both genders with higher start-up capital record better...

This paper shows that optimal unemployment insurance contracts are age-dependent. Older workers have only a few years left on the labor market prior to retirement. This short horizon implies a more digressive replacement ratio. However, there is a sufficiently short distance to retirement for...

This paper estimates the economic and non-economic returns to volunteering for prime-aged women. A woman's decision to engage in unpaid work, and to marry and have children, is formulated as a forward-looking discrete choice dynamic programming problem. Simulated maximum likelihood estimates of...

With declining population and fertility rates below replacement levels, Russia is currently facing a demographic crisis. Starting in 2007, the federal government has pursued an ambitious pro-natalist policy. Women who give birth to at least two children are entitled to "maternity capital"...

This study measures productivity growth using the Metafrontier Malmquist-Luenberger productivity growth index (MML index) method and decomposes the index. The results are compared with those obtained from the conventional Malmquist-Luenberger (ML) productivity growth index. MML has two...

We exploit an exogenous increase in General Educational Development (GED) testing requirements to determine whether raising the difficulty of the test causes students to finish high school rather than drop out and GED certify. We find that a six point decrease in GED pass rates induces a 1.3...