The empirical literature tries to identify credit rationing and its determinants by using balance sheet data or evidence from corporate surveys. Observational equivalence, identification problems, and interview biases are serious problems in these studies. We analyse the determinants of credit...

The paper analyzes the relationship between stock prices and fundamentals for a large sample of US stocks in the last ten years using a random coefficient model. Heterogeneity and omitted variable bias are properly taken into account with model coefficients being allowed to vary across time and...

The paper tests predictions of a traditional intra-household bargaining model which, under reasonable assumptions, shows that lack of bargaining power in the value chain significantly reduces the capacity of obtaining benefits from increased product demand arising from trade liberalization and...

The New Proposal of Basel Committee on banking regulation issued in January 2001 allows banks to use Internal Rating Systems to classify firms. Within this context, the main problem is to find a model that fits data as better as possible, providing at the same time good prediction and...

The analysis of overdispersed counts has been the focus of a large amount of literature, with the general objective of providing reliable parameter estimates in the presence of heterogeneity or dependence among subjects. In this paper we extend the standard variance component models to the...

Our empirical analysis on the determinants of self-declared happiness on more than 100 000 individuals from representative samples in 82 world countries does not reject the hypothesis that the time spent for relationships has a significant and positive impact on happiness. This basic nexus helps...

  The paper tests predictions of a traditional intra-household bargaining model which, under reasonable assumptions, shows that lack of bargaining power in the value chain significantly reduces the capacity for obtaining benefits from increased product demand arising from trade liberalization...

We present an empirical analysis of the determinants of growth for a sample of Italian small and medium sized firms. We show that, when investigating a sample which includes firms between 10 and 50 employees and a set of variables larger than those usually considered in the literature,...