As opposed to many other school inputs, textbooks have frequently been demonstrated to significantly foster student achievement. Using the rich data set provided by the 'Program on the Analysis of Education Systems' (PASEC) for five francophone, sub-Saharan African countries, this paper goes...

Empirical work on the wage impact of training has noted that unobserved heterogeneity of training participants should play a role. The expected return to training, which partly depends on unobservable characteristics, is likely to be a crucial criterion in the decision to take part in training...

In this paper we empirically test whether public R&D subsidies crowd out private R&D investment in Flanders and Germany, using firm level data from the Flemish and German part of the Community Innovation survey (CIS III and IV). Both the non-parametric matching estimator and the conditional...

This paper investigates the impact of a high school degree on the wage distribution in the period from 1984 to 2004 in Germany. In that period the share of male workers with a high school degree increased from 16 to 25 percent. An econometric evaluation estimator is used to analyze quantile...

This paper aims to shed light on some of the major allocative consequences of financial market bubbles. In March 1997, the Neuer Markt in Germany opened. Six years later, in June 2003, it closed forever. In the interim period lay the spectacular rise and fall of the first and most important...

This paper studies the effect of sharing a common native language on international trade. Switzerland hosts three major native language groups which adjoin countries sharing the same native majority languages. In regions close to the internal language border the alternate major language is...

We analyse the effect of public Research and Development (R&D) subsidies on private sector innovativeness for a cross-section of East German firms applying different matching estimations, which are primary based on an estimate of a propensity score. To do so, we use a until now unexplored...

New macro empirical evidence is provided to assess the relative importance of object and idea gaps in explaining the world income distribution dynamics over a benchmark period 1960-1985. Results are then extended through 1995. Formal statistical hypothesis tests allow us to discriminate between...

We propose a geoadditive negative binomial model (Geo-NB-GAM) for regional count data which allows us to simultaneously address some important methodological issues, such as spatial clustering, nonlinearities and overdispersion. We apply this model to study location determinants of inward...

The production of ethanol and sugar from sugar cane has sharply increased for the last 20 years. If there are overall incentives to substitute the consumption of fossil fuels by biofuels, the increase of production and the expansion of new cultivated areas of sugar cane have eventually an impact...