Before recent technological developments in telecom the use of available fixed line was limited to voice telecommunication only. At present the high frequencies on the subscriber line were used for high speed internet access. This Internet access technology is generally referred to as broadband....

In general, countries with more equal income distribution generally enjoy better health. Earlier empirical studies on the relationship between income distribution and health at country level present strong evidence that income inequality on an average impedes the improvement of population...

Compared to time-series or cross-section analyses, panel data allow us to control for individual specific characteristics - possibly unobservable - which may be correlated with certain explanatory variables in the specification of an economic relationship. Not controlling for unobservables leads...

We provide a comprehensive overview of latent Markov (LM) models for the analysis of longitudinal data. The main assumption behind these models is that the response variables are conditionally independent given a latent process which follows a first-order Markov chain. We first illustrate the...

The paper introduces for the most frequently used three-dimensional panel data sets several random effects model specifications. It derives appropriate estimation methods for the balanced and unbalanced cases. An application is also presented where the bilateral trade of 20 EU countries is...

The estimation of limited dependent variable panel data models usually involves objective functions in which integrals appear without a closed form solution: this is the case of the panel data Tobit model with random effects. Recently, simulation methods have shown to be useful in the inference...

Traditional panel stochastic frontier studies on privatization of Chinese State-owned firms face a major challenge, namely, the endogeneity problem. The endogeneity problem is present because decision-making process of privatization in China is very likely influenced by some unobserved...

In the present paper, the inverted-U shape relationship between growth and inequality found in Chen(2003), is reexamined. We decompose productivity growth into efficiency improvement, capital accumulation and technological progress and then ascertain their determinants by employing a fixed...

Sleep is an important part of life, with an individual spending an estimated 32 years of her life asleep. Despite this importance, little is known about life satisfaction and sleep duration. Using German panel data, it is shown that sleep is an important factor for life satisfaction and that...

Climate extreme events are constantly increasing. What is the effect of these potentially catastrophic events on insurance demand in Italy, with particular reference to the economic activities? Extreme precipitation events over most of the midlatitude land masses and over wet tropical regions...