In this paper, I illustrate the additional information that can be prodivided in estimating the lower bound (Sutton 1991, 1998) by using quantile regression. Quantile regression allows us to invesigate the influence of outliers. Previous lower bound have been performed using the simplex method....

Collective bargaining in Germany takes place either at the industry level or at the firm level; collective bargaining coverage is much higher than union density; and not all employees in a covered firm are necessarily covered. This institutional setup suggests to distinguish explicitly union...

This paper examines changes in the Greek wage distribution over 1995-2002 and the role of skill in these changes. The methodology adopted is the Machado-Mata counterfactual decomposition, which separates the part of wage changes that is due to job and workers' characteristics (composition...

Recent theoretical and empirical work has demonstrated a clear negative link between macroeconomic and political uncertainty and levels of private investment across countries. This result raises the question what institutions might help reduce this uncertainty, in particular by allowing host...

This paper investigates whether the geographic distribution of manufacturing activities depends on the size of plants. Using Italian data, we find, as in Kim [Kim, S., 1995. Expansion of markets and the geographic concentration of economic activities: the trends in U.S. regional manufacturing...

In order to value non-market goods, economists estimate individuals’ willingness to pay (WTP) for these goods using revealed or stated preference methods. We compare these conventional approaches with subjective well-being (SWB), which is based on individuals’ ratings of their happiness or...

This paper uses a difference-in-difference style estimation strategy to test separately the impact of competition from public sector and private sector hospitals on the efficiency of public hospitals. Our identification strategy takes advantage of the phased introduction of a recent set of...

Efficient semiparametric and parametric estimates are developed for a spatial autoregressive model, containing nonstochastic explanatory variables and innovations suspected to be non-normal. The main stress is on the case of distribution of unknown, nonparametric, form, where series...

We establish valid theoretical and empirical Edgeworth expansions for density-weighted averaged derivative estimates of semiparametric index models.

In a panel data model with fixed effects, possible cross-sectional dependence is investigated in a spatial autoregressive setting. An Edgeworth expansion is developed for the maximum likelihood estimate of the spatial correlation coefficient. The expansion is used to develop more accurate...