We summarize Francis Fukuyama’s State Building: Governance and World Order in the Twenty-first Century (London, Profile Books, 2005)and explore the limits of its arguments. State Building is a book with a very wide scope that essentially tries to “ground” and expand the fields of political...

In contrast to the United States and European countries, China has witnessed a widening gender pay gap in the past two decades. Nevertheless, the size of the gender pay gap could still be underestimated as a result of not accounting for the low-wage women who have dropped out of the labor force....

This paper investigates the impact of the relative growth of skilled migration on the structure of Australian wages. Unlike conventional approaches, the present study uses macro data to examine the response of wages to immigration flows. We use instrumental variable (IV) techniques to deal with...

Microcredit has been shown to be effective in reducing poverty in many developing countries. However, less is known about its effect on human capital formation. In this paper, we develop a model examining the relation between microcredit and child labour. We then empirically examine the impact...

This paper investigates the potential problem of ‘pseudo-exogenous’ instruments in regression models. We show that the performance of Hausman test is deteriorated when the instruments are asymptotically exogenous but endogenous in finite samples, through Monte Carlo simulations.

This paper uses a unique data set on more than 600,000 mortgage contracts to estimate a credit supply function which allows for risk-heterogeneity. Non-linearity is modelled using quantile regressions. We propose an instrumental variable approach in which changes in the tax treatment of housing...

Using household survey data for Albania, the paper investigates the effect of remittances on health capital accumulation. Total expenditure is divided into two categories: expenditure on medicines and expenditure on visits and laboratory services. The estimation is presented for two separate...

Using a sample of 28 sub-Saharan African countries during the period of 2000-2010, this paper examines the effect of health aid on health outcomes. After taking into account the endogeneity and using the instrumental variable approach, the results reveal that health aid improves health outcomes...

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,...

This paper evaluates the causal relationship between smoking and body weight through two waves (2004-2006) of the British Household Panel Survey. We model the effect of changes in smoking habits, such as quitting or reducing, and account for the heterogeneous responses of individuals located at...