The main purpose of this paper is to present new evidence on the long run relationship between R&D efforts and productivity performance of UK manufacturing industries in the presence of inter-industry and international spillovers of technology. The main dataset used to perform this analysis is a...

This paper explores the effects of measurement error on dynamic forecasting models. The paper sets out to illustrate a trade off that confronts forecasters and policymakers when they use data that are measured with error. On the one hand, observations on recent data give valuable clues as to the...

Vietnam enjoyed rapid economic growth and a sharp reduction in child stunting in the 1990s. Economic growth can increase children's nutritional status in two ways. First, by raising household incomes, which can be used it to purchase more food, medicine and medical services. Second, by raising...

The low-income credit union modelled in this paper is an institution with a particular form of contract designed to allow it to operate among agents that are excluded from using banks. Specifically credit unions deal with those potentially on the minimum income guarantee. The challenge facing...

This paper investigates the causes underlying the poor school performance of children in rural Bangladesh, while focusing on the effect of work on school progress. To this end, a dynamic switching model is presented for the sequence of school and work outcomes up to the end of secondary school,...

International organizations pursue multiple objectives in hiring policies including cultural diversity, reducing costs and avoiding discrimination among which there can be sharp trade-offs. The paper studies how these trade-offs are resolved in the World Bank's hiring processes. It estimates...

McCallum (1995) shows in an influential contribution that, even when controlling for the impact of bilateral distance and region size, borders sharply reduce trade volumes between countries. We use in this paper data on bilateral trade flows between 94 French regions, for 10 industries and 2...

This paper uses a new set of industry data for the US and the UK non-agricultural market economy, to provide new evidence on the impact of ICT on TFP. We compare the results from standard panel data techniques with newly developed dynamic panel data estimation methods. The traditional industry...

This paper adopts a difference-in-differences estimator to examine the impact of privatisation on wages in the Portuguese banking industry for the period 1989-97. The design of the reform and the nature of dataset employed (matched employer-employee) provided a particularly important opportunity...

Microfinance programmes provide poor people with small loans given to jointly liable self-selected groups. Follow-up loans provide incentives to repay. In an experiment we investigate the influence of those features on strategic default. Each group member invests in an individual risky project,...