Abstract: Workplace referrals may resolve incentive problems that arise due to incomplete contracts. We use an in-depth primary data set covering low- and unskilled migrants from Western Uttar Pradesh (India), to examine this and alternative explanations for referral-based recruitment. We find...

This paper empirically examines the impact of corruption on FDI in European Union countries, including candidate countries. Our aim is to verify whether Efficient Grease Hypothesis does hold in the case of the EU. Contrary to the Hypothesis, we find that corruption has a negative impact on FDI.

Most motor bodily injury (BI) claims are settled by negotiation, with fewer than 5% of cases going to court. A well-defined negotiation strategy is thus very useful for insurance companies. In this paper we assume that the monetary compensation awarded in court is the upper amount to be offered...

Standard error corrections for clustered samples impose untested restrictions on spatial correlations. Our example shows these are too conservative, compared with a spatial error model that exploits information on exact locations of observations, causing inference errors when cluster corrections...

The purpose of this paper is to discuss the effects of specific economic freedom categories on both economic growth and the environment, and present some important considerations for cross-country regressions. First, there is a survey of arguments for positive as well as negative effects of...

We investigate whether a worker’s sickness absence is affected by her colleagues’ absences from the workplace. The analysis is based on unique matched employer-employee data for Norwegian schoolteachers for the period 2001 to 2006 with information on different types of absences and multiple...

The decision to take more education is complex, and is influenced by individual ability, financial constraints, family background, preferences, etc. Such factors, normally unobserved by the researcher, introduce endogeneity and heterogeneity problems into estimating the returns to education. In...

This essay addresses the incidence of temporary migration in poor rural economies. The methodological view taken here is that temporary or seasonal migration is a strategy of self-insurance, used largely by peasant households in order to cope with the risk of unemployment and income loss during...

Unlike most studies of subjective well-being in developing countries, we use a fixed effects regression on three rounds of rich panel data to investigate the impact of relative standing on life satisfaction of respondents in urban Ethiopia. We find a consistently large negative impact of...

We use panel data from rural Ethiopia to investigate if participation in a safety net program enhances fertilizer adoption. Using a difference-in-difference estimator and inverse propensity score weighting we find that participation in Ethiopia’s food-for-work program increased fertilizer...