Twin births are often used as an instrument for fertility in models investigating the impact of family size on labour market and child outcomes. However, a large share of twin births (24% in our sample) are the result of fertility treatments, potentially causing twin births to be endogenous and...

Nowadays, when companies are dealing with severe global competition, they are making serious investments in Customer Relationship Management (CRM) strategies. One of the cornerstones in CRM is customer churn prediction, the practice of determining a mathematical relation between customer...

In this study we investigate using the mean reversion processes in financial risk management, as they provide an good description of stock price uctuations and market risks. This paper does not aim at being exhaustive, but gives examples for practically implementable models allowing for stylised...

The debate over the economic effects of military spending continues to develop, with no consensus, but a deepening understanding of the issues and limitations of previous work. A recent survey has suggested that the inclusion of post Cold War data has tended to make finding a negative effect...

The ultimate objective of the present paper is to empirically investigate the effectiveness of competition policy in developed and developing countries. Although its importance is continuously increasing, the effectiveness of competition policy still seems to lack the attention that it would...

The primary motivation behind this study was to search for evidence of the link between environmental quality and economic growth so as to answer the relevant question of whether economic growth alone could serve as a long-run solution to environmental damage as implied by EKC hypothesis. Here...

The empirical classification of leisure activities into luxuries, necessities, or inferior activities is useful for predicting the impact of economic development or life-cycle variations in wages on the organization of people’s leisure. We take a step in that direction. We present theoretical...

To empirically examine the unbiased effect of management practice on firm productivity, this paper aims to suggest an instrumental variable approach, which requires less costly method. This study uses three firm-level instrumental variables such as the motivations for organizational reform,...

In this paper it is shown how a Vasicek-model approach and the assumptions in Basel 2 regulatory framework can be used to develop measures of the probability of banks' failure. The Basel 2 framework is based on a Vasicek-model approach. The estimation of the propose measure of bank probability...

The paper develops a general Bayesian framework for robust linear static panel data models using epsilon-contamination. A two-step approach is employed to derive the conditional type II maximum likelihood (ML-II) posterior distribution of the coefficients and individual effects. The ML-II...