A major motivation of this study is to examine factors that are most important in contributing to the relatively poor efficiency performance of Thai manufacturing SMEs. The results obtained will be significant in devising effective policies aimed at tackling this poor performance. This paper...

Recently, microfinance has come under increasing criticism raising questions of the validity of iconic studies which have justified the microfinance phenomenon. This paper applies propensity score matching (PSM), which has become widely used for the analysis of observational data, to the study...

Using a unique dataset collected in 59 rural Gambian villages, we study how ethnic heterogeneity is related to the structure of four economic exchange networks: land, labor, inputs and credit. We find that different measures of village-level ethnic fragmentation are mostly uncorrelated with...

A unique dataset of social and economic networks collected in 60 rural Gambian villages is used to study the ways in which households with links outside the village (that are considered as a proxy for market connections) behave in the locally available exchange networks for land, labor, input...

In recent years, the international community has expanded efforts in programme evaluation to improve the accountability of development projects. This paper presents approaches to implementing state-of-the-art evaluations in rural electrification projects, taking into account specific challenges...

Recent microfinance crises have put into question the effectiveness of microfinance for poverty alleviation. In this context, non-financial services supplied by microfinance institutions re-emerge as a mechanism to strengthen microfinance’s effect on wellbeing through human capital formation....

The question of whether two drugs - namely alcohol and tobacco - are used as complements or substitutes is of crucial interest if side-effects of anti-drug policies are considered. Numerous papers have empirically addressed this issue by estimating demand systems for alcohol and tobacco and...

This paper considers the shape invariant modelling approach in semiparametric regression estimation. Nonparametric functions of similar shape are linked by parametric transformations with unknown parameters. A computationally convenient estimation procedure is suggested. √N- consistency of the...

Consumption based equivalence scales are estimated by applying the extended partially linear model (EPLM) to the 1998 Income and Consumption Survey (EVS) of Germany. The chosen flexible semiparametric specification is able to capture a large variety of functional forms of household expenditure...