Stochastic frontier production functions are estimated for Bulgarian (1993–5) and Romanian (1994–5) manufacturing industries using firm-level panel data. The technical efficiency of firms is found to vary significantly both within and across industrial sectors in each country. We find strong...

This paper adopts the incomplete contracting perspective to study a firm’s continuous choice between producing an essential input in-house (full integration), contracting part of the production out (tapered integration), and contracting all of the production out (non-integration), when (i) an...

This paper reviews the cross-country record of economic growth, using as organizing framework how economic theory has guided that empirical analysis. The paper argues that recent studies of economic growth - both empirical and theoretical - distinguish from previous work in three distinct ways:...

We construct company panel datasets for manufacturing firms in Belgium, France, Germany and the UK, covering the period 1978-89. These datasets are used to estimate a range of empirical investment equations, and to investigate the role played by financial factors in each country. A robust...

We propose a portmanteau test for serial correlation of the error term in a fixed effects model. The test is derived as a conditional Lagrange multiplier test, but it also has a straightforward Wald test interpretation. In Monte Carlo experiments, the test displays good size and power properties.

The problem of how to control for covariates is endemic in evaluation research. Covariate-matching provides an appealing control strategy, but with continuous or high-dimensional covariate vectors, exact matching may be impossible or involve small cells. Matching observations that have the same...

Many European countries have sought to increase the efficiency of national railroad companies through a range of reforms: separating infrastructure and operations, creating independent regulatory institutions and providing access to the network to third parties. To estimate the effects of...

Cette etude a pour objet d'analyser les comportements d'offre de soins des medecins liberaux francais. On dispose pour cela d'un panel non-cylindre de 7 925 medecins omnipraticiens ou specialistes, des secteurs 1 ou2, suivis de la periode 1979-1993 et representatif de la population concernee....

The purpose of this paper is to formulate procedures for the analysis of the time series behaviour of micro panel data subject to censoring. We assume an autoregressive model with random effects for a latent variable which is only partly observed due to a selection mechanism. Our methods are...

This paper analyzes empirically a public policy promoting industrial clusters in France. Cluster policies have become popular in many countries but have not been extensively evaluated empirically. We use data on production and employment for firms that benefited from the policy and on firms that...