There is debate about whether microfinance has positive impacts on education and health for borrowing households in developing countries. To provide evidence for this debate we use a new survey designed to meet the conditions for propensity score matching (PSM) and examine the impact of...

Quantile Treatment Effects are estimated to study the impacts of household credit access on health spending by poor households in one District of Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. There are significant positive effects of credit on the health budget shares of households with low healthcare spending. In...

The nonparametric test for change-point detection proposed by Gombay and Horváth is revisited and extended in the broader setting of empirical process theory. The resulting testing procedure for potentially multivariate observations is based on a sequential generalization of the functional...

We prove a law of large numbers for random walks in certain kinds of i.i.d. random environments in Zd that is an extension of a result of Bolthausen et al. (2003) [4]. We use this result, along with the lace expansion for self-interacting random walks, to prove a monotonicity result for the...

Recent studies have concluded that the ERM has facilitated some degree of inflation convergence among its members with limited evidence of German leadership. These conclusions are based on national inflation measures which reflect aggregated output thereby masking different experiences at the...

Applying a stochastic production frontier to sector-level data within manufacturing, this paper examines total factor productivity (TFP) growth for seven East Asian economies during 1963-98, using both single country and cross-country regressions. The analysis focuses on the trend in...

The extent to which EU fiscal policies have converged during the ERM period is investigated. Using tests for cointegration and weak exogeneity, it is found that the degree of commitment towards ERM membership influences the degree of fiscal integration in the EU. It is also found that the German...

This paper combines classic and spatial shift-share decompositions of 1981 to 2006 employment change across the 27 states of Brazil. The classic shift-share method shows higher employment growth rates for underdeveloped regions that are due to an advantageous industry-mix and also due to...