Using data spanning over four decades (1960-2000), this paper employs Engel's needsbased approach to analyzing household expenditure patterns to find evidence for the existence of a stable hierarchy of expenditure patterns at low levels of household income. Second, we investigate how rising...

The rapidly growing literature on the relationship between energy consumption and economic growth has not univocally identified the real causal relationship yet. We argue that bivariate models, which analyze the causality at the level of the total economy, are not appropriate - especially in...

Inter-firm competition has received much attention in the theoretical literature, but recent empirical work suggests that the growth rates of rival firms are uncorrelated, and that firm growth can be taken as an essentially independent process. We begin by investigating the correlations of the...

Despite lower incomes, the self-employed consistently report higher satisfaction with their jobs. But are self-employed individuals also happier, more satisfied with their lives as a whole? High job satisfaction might cause them to neglect other important domains of life, such that the...

How can economic theory explain the reasons why consumers adopt innovations? Using the example of innovations in washing machines two approaches are compared. The first focuses in the manner of household production theory on changes in constraints without specifying preferences, leading to the...

By representing a system of budget shares as an approximate factor model we determine its rank, i.e. the number of common functional forms, or factors, spanning the space of Engel curves. Once the common factors are estimated via approximate principal components, we identify them by imposing...

The paper analyzes unequal regional development in Kazakhstan. Applying the nonlinear least squares method in presence of spatial correlation we estimate the convergence rate of wages across Kazakh regions for the period 2003-2009. The estimated convergence rate is about 3% which is somewhat...

In this paper we analyze the determinants of interregional migration in Kazakhstan using quarterly panel data on region to region migration in 2008-2010. To the best of our knowledge this is the first study on interregional population flows in Central Asia. We find that migration is determined...

NGOs could help scale up foreign aid efforts by mobilizing private donations. However, fundraising activities do not necessarily result in higher donations, and substitution effects between different sources of revenue may diminish the overall pool of NGOs' resources. This paper examines the...