Classical regression analysis uses partial coefficients to measure the influences of some variables (regressors) on another variable (regressand). However, a descriptive point of view shows that these coefficients are very bad measures of influence. Their interpretation as an average change of...

In this paper we analyze the trend of the gender gap between wives and husbands for Mediterranean countries with a strong family tradition, using data from the European Household Panel (ECHP) of 2001 and the European Survey on Income and Living Conditions (EU-SILC) of 2006. In general, wives and...

This paper provides a survey and synthesis of econometric tools that have been employed to study economic growth. While these tools range across a variety of statistical methods, they are united in the common goals of first, identifying interesting contemporaneous patterns in growth data and...

Recent studies have used regression decomposition to analyze recent data and found that over seventy percent of the black-white wealth differences remained unexplained (See, e.g., Gittleman and Wolff 2000; Altonji, Doraszelski and Segal 2000; and Blau and Graham 1990). Their results are limited to the...

This paper presents empirical evidence of a positive effect of council size on government spending using a data set of 2,056 municipalities in the German state of Bavaria over a period of 21 years. We apply a regression discontinuity design to avoid an endogeneity bias. In particular, we exploit...

A recent literature has used variation just around deterministic legislative population thresholds to identify the causal effects of institutional changes. This paper reviews the use of regression discontinuity designs using such population thresholds. Our concern involves three arguments: (1)...

We focus on the construction of confidence corridors for multivariate nonparametric generalized quantile regression functions. This construction is based on asymptotic results for the maximal deviation between a suitable nonparametric estimator and the true function of interest which follow...

This paper investigates the effects of ordinal regressors in linear regression models. Each ordered categorical variable is interpreted as a rough measurement of an underlying continuous variable as it is often done in microeconometrics for the dependent variable. It is shown that using ordinal...

The purpose of this article is to introduce the technique and main findings of meta-analysis to the reader, who is unfamiliar with the field and has the usual objections. A meta-analysis is a quantitative survey of a literature reporting estimates of the same parameter. The funnel showing the...

The purpose of this note is to introduce the technique and main findings of meta-analysis to the reader, who is unfamiliar with the field and has the usual objections. A meta-analysis is a quantitative survey of a literature reporting estimates of the same parameter. The funnel showing the...