Using data on 1,176 Italian municipalities in 2005, this paper discusses a number of factors associated with the development of a particular type of innovative activities, namely e-government services supplied by local public administrations (PAs). We find that municipalities which got involved...

Two distribution free estimators are proposed to estimate the mean of a dependent variable after fitting a semiparametric two-part heteroscedastic regression model to a transformation of the dependent variable. We show that the proposed estimators are consistent and have asymptotic normal...

The elasticity of risky sexual behavior to changes in local HIV infection prevalence is estimated using a longitudinal survey of the sexual behavior and health of gay men in San Francisco during the 1980s. An average respondent decreases risky behavior by about 5% in response to a 10% increase...

Ninety per cent of smokers report having their first whole cigarette before the age of 19. Thus, it is important to have policies such as youth access laws which may prevent youth from becoming future smokers. In Canada, the Tobacco Act prohibits retailers from furnishing tobacco products to...

This paper focuses on the trade-off between formal care and informal care for disabled elderly people living at home in France. Using data from the French\ Handicap Santé Ménages " survey (2008), we try to answer the question of the effect of an increase in formal home care hours on the...

We make use of panel data from the China Health and Nutrition Survey between 1991 and 2006 to investigate whether health insurance increases out-of-pocket (OOP) health expenditure risk. We find that health insurance increases the probability of catastrophic OOP health expenditures using a series...

Based on the empirical firm growth literature and on heterogeneous (microeconomic) adjustment models, this paper empirically investigates the impact of European industry fluctuations and domestic business cycles on the growth performance of European firms. Since the implementation of the Single...

This note proposes a generalized two-part model for fractional response variables that nests the one-part model proposed by Papke and Wooldridge (1996). Consequently, a Wald test allows to discriminate between these two competing models. A small scale Monte Carlo simulation demonstrates that the...

Based on the empirical firm growth literature and on heterogeneous (microeconomic) adjustment models, this paper empirically investigates the impact of European industry fluctuations and domestic business cycles on the growth performance of European firms. Since the implementation of the Single...