Bringing welfare recipients into jobs is a major goal of German labour market policy since a reform of the year 2005. Direct job creation providing participants with tem-porary subsidized jobs mainly in the non-profit sector plays an important role for achieving this goal. There are three...

Stochastic frontier models are widely used to measure, e.g., technical efficiencies of firms. The classical stochastic frontier model often suffers from the empirical artefact that the residuals of the production function may have a positive skewness, whereas a negative one is expected under the...

This paper provides a comprehensive Monte Carlo comparison of different finite-sample biascorrection methods for autoregressive processes. We consider situations where the process is either mildly explosive or has a unit root. The case of highly persistent stationary is also studied. We compare...

The use of informal finance is primarily discussed in the context of developing countries and start-up businesses. Survey data used in this study, however, shows that ``Family and Friends'' (F\&F) finance is also remarkably widespread among established firms in Germany, a highly developed...

Sequences of active labour market programmes (ALMPs) may be part of an intensified activation strategy targeting hard-to-place individuals who may be long-term unemployed and who may encounter extreme difficulty in finding jobs. Such sequences are very common among welfare recipients in Germany,...

This work analyzes the evolution of real public expenditures of local and regional administrations (LRA), in Portugal, in the period after the Second World War. It also aims to estimate the elasticities associated to determinants, which explain the found growth. As most relevant results, it is...

The present study aims to verify whether the balance-of-payments constrained growth approach is suitable for explaining the Portuguese growth performance during the last decades. For that, we adopt "Thirlwall's Law" that predicts actual growth by the ratio of the exports growth relative to the...

Likelihood functions of spatial autoregressive models with normal but heteroskedastic disturbances have been already derived [Anselin (1988, ch.6)]. But there is no implementation for maximum likelihood estimation of these likelihood functions in general (heteroskedastic disturbances) cases....

In this paper we propose a new small area estimation methodology aimed at the estimation of Value Added, Labor Cost and related competitiveness indicators for subsets of the population of Italian small and medium sized manufacturing firms classified according to geographical region, industrial...

The paper considers the influence of federal government expenditures and transfers on interregional convergence in gross regional product (GRP) per capita and wages in Russia over 2005?2011. Such an influence is not found. The federal government's policy was reactive and was not focused on...