This study extends extant research on prenatal care and birthweight to the South American country of Uruguay. The data represent a population of poor women from a less-developed country with a health care system that provides both prenatal and obstetric care free of charge. We find a positive...

This paper investigates the dynamic causal link between exports and economic growth using both linear and nonlinear Granger causality tests. We use annual South African data on real exports and real gross domestic product from 1911-2011. The linear Granger causality result shows no evidence of...

This paper makes several contributions to the literature on the important yet difficult problem of estimating functions nonparametrically using instrumental variables. First, we derive the minimax optimal sup-norm convergence rates for nonparametric instrumental variables (NPIV) estimation of...

Oil is perceived as a good diversification tool for stock markets. To fully understand this potential, we propose a new empirical methodology that combines generalized autoregressive score copula functions with high frequency data and allows us to capture and forecast the conditional...

In 2001 the Italian tertiary education system embarked in a broad process of reform. The main novelty brought by the reform was a reduction of the length of study to get a first level degree together with the introduction of a 2-years, second level, master degree. This paper aims at studying the...

We explore the use of nowcasts from the Philadelphia Survey of Professional Forecasters as a starting point for macroeconomic forecasting. Specifically, survey nowcasts are treated as anadditional observation of the time series of interest. This simple approach delivers enhanced model...

Our study investigates the benefits that the Czech inhabitants could gain from the reduction of road traffic noise. We applied contingent valuation study in order to estimate willingness-to-pay (WTP) for the reduction of traffic noise by 10 dB (from 70 dB up 60 dB). Using data from 2010 Czech...

Offering unemployed individuals a subsidy to become self-employed is a widespread active labor market policy strategy. Previous studies have illustrated its high effectiveness to help participants escaping unemployment and improving their labor market prospects compared to other unemployed...

This article aims to provide an introduction to empirical revealed preference (RP) and an overview of the current state of the field. We hope to give a sense of how RP methods work and the types of questions they can address and to assess the strengths and drawbacks of the approach. After...

The estimation of optimal support boundaries under the monotonicity constraint is relatively unexplored and still in full development. This article examines a new extreme-value based model which provides a valid alternative for completely envelopment frontier models that often super from lack of...