Search results for "Endogeneity"
showing 10 items of 52 documents
Measuring state dependence in individual poverty histories when there is feedback to employment status and household composition
2009
This paper argues that the assumption of strict exogeneity, which is usually invoked in estimating models of state dependence with unobserved heterogeneity, is violated in the poverty context as important variables determining contemporaneous poverty status, in particular employment status and household composition, are likely to be influenced by past poverty outcomes. Therefore, a model of state dependence is developed that explicitly allows for possible feedback effects from past poverty to future employment and household composition outcomes. Empirical results based on data from the German Socio-Economic Panel (GSOEP) suggest that there are indeed such feedback effects and that failure t…
Do foreign workers reduce trade barriers? Microeconomic evidence
2015
This paper provides evidence that foreign workers reduce firms' trade costs and thus increase the probability that firms export. This informs both the literature on trade costs and the microeconomic literature on firms' export behaviour. We identify the nationality of each worker in a large sample of German establishments, and relate this to the exporting behaviour of these establishments. We allow for the possible endogeneity of an establishment's workforce by instrumenting the share of foreign workers with the regional distribution of foreign workers in the wider labour market. We find a significant effect of worker nationality on exporting which is not driven by the industrial, occupatio…
Does competition enhance the double-bottom-line performance of microfinance institutions?
2020
Abstract This paper investigates how competition affects the double-bottom-line performance of microfinance institutions (MFIs). While classical economic theory highlights that competition enhances efficiency and benefits both customers and firms, we argue that this is unlikely to apply to institutions operating in socially oriented industries, such as microfinance. Using a cross-country dataset of 4576 MFI-year observations (1139 unique MFIs) operating in 59 countries over a 10-year period (2005-2014), we find that competition has an adverse effect on MFIs’ economic sustainability and that competition undermines their breadth of outreach but enhances their depth of outreach. These results …
Estimating Engel curves under unit and item nonresponse
2010
SUMMARY This paper estimates food Engel curves using data from the first wave of the Survey on Health, Aging and Retirement in Europe (SHARE). Our statistical model simultaneously takes into account selectivity due to unit and item nonresponse, endogeneity problems, and issues related to flexible specification of the relationship of interest. We estimate both parametric and semiparametric specifications of the model. The parametric specification assumes that the unobservables in the model follow a multivariate Gaussian distribution, while the semiparametric specification avoids distributional assumptions about the unobservables. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Higher education and prosperity: from catholic missionaries to luminosity in India
2017
The article of record as published may be found at http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/ecoj.12551 This article estimates the impact of completed higher education on economic prosperity across Indian districts. To address the endogeneity of higher education, we use the location of Catholic missionaries circa 1911 as an instrument. Catholics constitute a very small share of the population in India and their influence beyond higher education has been limited. Our instrumental variable results find a positive effect of higher education on development, as measured by light density. The results are robust to alternative measures of development, and are not driven by lower levels of schooling or other chann…
Consumer Awareness and the Use of Payment Media: Evidence from Young Finnish Consumers
2008
In the market for payment media, some consumers use only one medium when paying for their point-of-sale transactions, while others use many. This pattern reflects the diffusion of new payment media, because a payment method innovation is typically first used simultaneously with the established methods. We study the use of multiple payment media by employing data on young Finnish consumers. We find that the use of multiple payment media is directly related to consumer awareness and that not controlling for the endogeneity of awareness can bias its effect downwards. These results suggest that increasing consumer awareness may have been underlying the rise of debit card use around the world. I…
Estimation de la relation de salaires de Mincer : choix de specification et enjeux économétriques
2012
In the present doctoral thesis, we estimated Mincer’s (1974) semi logarithmic wage function for the French and Pakistani labour force data. This model is considered as a standard tool in order to estimate the relationship between earnings/wages and different contributory factors. Despite of its vide and extensive use, simple estimation of the Mincerian model is biased because of different econometric problems. The main sources of bias noted in the literature are endogeneity of schooling, measurement error, and sample selectivity. We have tackled the endogeneity and measurement error biases via instrumental variables two stage least squares approach for which we have proposed two new instrum…
The Effects of IFRS Adoption on the Unconditional Conservatism of Spanish Listed Companies
2017
This paper analyses the effects on unconditional conservatism of the mandatory adoption of International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS) by Spanish listed companies in January 2005. The lack of robustness in the previous evidence justifies analysing this issue from different perspectives. To this end, we use, for the first time in this context, Ahmed and Duellman’s methodology (J. Account. Econ., 2007). In its design, these authors consider the impact of growth options and other future incomes, controlling for the idiosyncratic factors that the literature has found to condition this type of conservatism. Additionally, beyond the pooled regression techniques usually used, we use econome…
Testing for financial contagion between developed and emerging markets during the 1997 East Asian crisis
2005
In this paper we examine whether during the 1997 East Asian crisis there was any contagion from the four largest economies in the region (Thailand, Indonesia, Korea and Malaysia) to a number of developed countries (Japan, UK, Germany and France). Following Forbes and Rigobon, we test for contagion as a significant positive shift in the correlation between asset returns, taking into account heteroscedasticity and endogeneity bias. Furthermore, we improve on earlier empirical studies by carrying out a full sample test of the stability of the system that relies on more plausible (over) identifying restrictions. The estimation results provide some evidence of contagion, in particular from Japan…
Selection correction in panel data models: An application to the estimation of females' wage equations
2007
In recent years a number of panel estimators have been suggested for sample selection models, where both the selection equation and the equation of interest contain individual effects which are correlated with the explanatory variables. Not many studies exist that use these methods in practise. We present and compare alternative estimators, and apply them to a typical problem in applied econometrics: the estimation of the wage returns to experience for females. We discuss the assumptions each estimator imposes on the data, and the problems that occur in our applications. This should be particularly useful to practitioners who consider using such estimators in their own application. All esti…