Search results for "estimation"
showing 10 items of 924 documents
Human Capital Inequality and Economic Growth: Some New Evidence
2002
This paper provides new measures of human capital inequality for a broad panel of countries. Taking attainment levels from Barro and Lee (2001), we compute Gini coefficients and the distribution of education by quintiles for 108 countries over five-year intervals from 1960 to 2000. Using this new cross-country data on human capital inequality two main conclusions are obtained. First, most countries in the world have tended to reduce the inequality in human capital distribution. Second, human capital inequality measures provide more robust results than income inequality measures in the estimation of standard growth and investment equations.
The economic impact of migration: productivity analysis for Spain and the UK
2012
Over the past 20 years labour has become increasingly mobile and whilst employment and earnings effects in host countries have been extensively analysed, the implications for firm and industry performance have received far less attention. This paper explores the direct economic consequences of immigration on host nations’ productivity performance at a sectoral level in two very different European countries, Spain and the UK. Whilst the UK has traditionally seen substantial immigration, for Spain the phenomenon is much more recent. Our findings from a growth accounting analysis show that migration has made a negative contribution to labour productivity growth in Spain and a negative but negl…
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…
Labor productivity and firm-level TFP with technology-specific production functions
2020
Abstract We investigate the technological dimension of productivity, presenting an empirical methodology based on mixture models to disentangle the labor productivity differences associated with the firm's choice of technology (BTFP) and those related to the firm's ability to exploit the adopted technology (WTFP). The estimation endogenously determines the number of technologies (in the sector) and degree of technology sharing across firms (i.e., for each firm, the probability of using a given technology). By using comparable data for about 35,000 firms worldwide distributed across 22 (two-digit) sectors, we show BTFP to be at least as important as WTFP in explaining the labor productivity …
Efficiency and Productivity of Italian Tourist Destinations: A Quantitative Estimation Based on Data Envelopment Analysis and the Malmquidt Method
2006
This paper aims to provide a statistical analysis of the relative economic performance of Italian tourist areas. It uses two modelling approaches to estimate the competitiveness of these regions, viz. data envelopment analysis (DEA) and the Malmquist method. Our results show that the competitiveness position of several Italian regions has not improved over the years under consideration.
Assessment of water shortage in urban areas
2007
Recent history has demonstrated that extreme hydrological events such as floods and droughts can create additional stress on water supplies essential for human and ecosystem health. As stated several times by European Environmental Agency, the prudent and efficient use of water is thus an important issue in Europe and a number of policies and mechanisms have been used or have been formulated to ensure sustainable use of water in the long term. Urban uses are responsible of almost the 17% of the total European fresh water consumption and they are rapidly growing depending on the extension of urban areas and concentration of population in cities. The present chapter will discuss the phases in…
Scad-elastic net and the estimation of individual tourism expenditure determinants
2014
This paper introduces the use of scad-elastic net in the assessment of the determinants of individual tourist spending. This technique approaches two main estimation-related issues of primary importance. So far studies of tourism literature have made a wide use of classic regressions, whose results might be affected by multicollinearity. In addition, because of the absence of robust economic theory on tourism behavior, regressor selection is often left to researcher's choice when not driven by non-optimal automatic criteria. Scad-elastic net is an OLS model that accounts for both these problems by including two types of parameters constraints, namely the smoothly clipped absolute deviation …
Testing for a Political Bias in Freedom House Democracy Scores: Are U.S. Friendly States Judged To Be More Democratic?
2012
Several scholars have criticized the Freedom House democracy ratings as being politically biased; do countries indeed incorrectly receive better ratings that have stronger political ties with the United States? Starting from the assumption that other indices of democracy can be used as benchmark data, different estimation strategies are employed to gauge whether differences between a number of alternative indices of democracy and the FH ratings can be explained in a systematic manner by variables that record relationships between the U.S. and the countries under investigation. Differentiating between the period before 1989 and after 1988, I obtain consistent evidence of a substantial bias i…
Foreign capital, credit constraints and continuity of firms’ R&D
2015
ABSTRACTIn this article, we investigate the role of foreign capital participation as a means for firms to overcome the obstacle posed by credit constraints to sustain R&D investments. Using data for Spanish manufacturing firms in the period 1990–2006, we show that firms with foreign capital are significantly less likely to stop already initiated R&D projects and also more likely to sustain R&D investment when facing credit constraints. Our results are robust to positive selection into foreign capital participation, which we control through a set of variables chosen from a propensity score estimation, and to firms’ fixed-effects.
Emergence of tomato leaf curl New Delhi virus in Italy: estimation of incidence and genetic diversity
2019
Tomato leaf curl New Delhi virus (ToLCNDV) is a bipartite begomovirus (family Geminiviridae) identified for the first time in 1995 in Asia, from where it spread into several countries of the Mediterranean basin. ToLCNDV was found in Spain in 2012, and subsequently in Tunisia and Italy. The first outbreak in Italy occurred at the end of 2015 in Trapani province (Sicily) on zucchini squashes. Then in 2016, ToLCNDV was found in infected zucchini plants in Campania, Lazio and Sardinia regions, and in 2017 in Calabria. This study addressed the dispersion and genetic diversity of ToLCNDV isolates in Italy. A total of 1400 plants were analysed. Phylogenetic analysis showed low variability among th…