In this paper, we present a procedure for consistent estimation of the severity and frequency distributions based on incomplete insurance data and demonstrate that ignoring the thresholds leads to a serious underestimation of the ruin probabilities. The event frequency is modelled with a...

In recent years, an important number of impact studies have attempted to examine the effect of credit on income poverty; however, many of these studies have not paid sufficient attention to the problems of endogeneity and selection bias. The few exceptional cases have employed econometric...

According to the 2003 National Household Survey, mean labour income for an indigenous worker is only 56% of that for a non-indigenous worker. Studies of ethnic discrimination in Peru’s labour markets generally find that discrimination is too low to explain inequalities of this magnitude....

In this paper, we compare standard approaches used to handle losses in logarithmic stochastic profit frontier models with a simple novel approach. We discuss discriminatory power, rank stability and precision of profit efficiency scores. Our new method enhances rank stability and discriminatory...

This paper discusses the extent and the determinants of the internationalization of European inventive activity, between 1990 and 2005, using an innovative method to treat the information contained in the European Patent Office's Patstat database. We introduce a new set of indicators measuring...

Improved household accessibility to credit is identified as a significant determinant of intra-household re-allocation of labour resources with important implications for productivity, income, and poverty status. However, credit accessibility could also have wider impacts on poverty if it leads...

In the course of a comprehensive labor market reform started in 2002 and finished through the implementation of the most radical measure Hartz IV in 2005, I exploit its impact on matching processes in Germany. I use disaggregated data for 178 local employment agencies to examine the effects of...

When the coefficients of a Tobit model are estimated by maximum likelihood their covariance matrix is typically, even if not necessarily, associated with the algorithm employed to maximize the likelihood. Covariance estimators used in practice are derived by: (1) the Hessian (observed...