Many kinds of data in the social sciences have a hierarchical, multilevel or clustered structure. For example, municipalities are grouped into regions; regions are formed within countries; and quite often, countries belong to supra-national organizations. Once groupings are established, they...

Drawing on an evaluation test of the mathematics performances of Moroccan secondary school students, the article intends to identify the main significant variables explaining the performance in mathematics. The data gathered from TIMSS 2003 program covers a sample of 1 140 students attending 68...

The goal of this paper was to investigate whether or not the factors beyond individual characteristics were associated with maternal smoking during pregnancy. Social capital has been found to have both negative and positive implications for health behaviors, and this study attempted to...

We estimate a meta-analysis of willingness to pay for tropical coral reef recreation and evaluate its potential for international benefit transfer. The goal is improved value surface estimation and benefit transfer reliability. We compare model results to those of Brander, L., P. van Beukering...

This paper uses patent citation data to analyze the quality of university technology across European regions. The empirical analysis draws on a panel dataset of 4580 European university-owned patents classified by 202 European regions over the period 1998–2004. The methodology involves a...

In multi-level regression, using a fixed effect for each cluster leads to models that are flexible but that have poor estimation accuracy. In small area studies, for example, fixed effects models are typically over-parameterized. Regarding region as a random effect reduces the number of...

This paper provides new empirical evidence on the relationship between migration and social integration. It explores the hypothesis that migrants essentially differ from non-migrants with regard to the length of residence in the country – which is a proxy of migrants’ social distance to...

There is ongoing debate regarding the shape of life-course trajectories in mental health. Many argue the relationship is U-shaped, with mental health declining with age to mid-life, then improving. However, I argue that these models are beset by the age–period–cohort (APC) identification...

Drawing from both the place stratification and ethnic enclave perspectives, we use multilevel modeling to investigate the relationships between women's race/ethnicity (i.e., non-Hispanic white, non-Hispanic black, Asian, and Hispanic) and maternal smoking during pregnancy, and examine if these...

Previous studies on hospitals’ efficiency often refer to quite restrictive functional forms for the technology (Aigner et al., 1977, J. Econom., 6, 21–37) . In this paper, referring to a study about some hospitals in Lombardy, we formulate convenient correctives to a statistical model based...