infonet-economy

This paper assesses the impact of internal infrastructure and landlockedness on Central Asian trade. The impact of landlockedness on Central Asian's trade costs is split into several components, using a panel gravity equation estimated on a large sample of countries (167 countries over 1992-2004). Our findings highlight that an improvement in the own infrastructure of Central…

This paper develops IV estimators for unconditional quantile treatment effects (QTE) when the treatment selection is endogenous. In contrast to conditional QTE, i.e. the effects conditional on a large number of covariates X, the unconditional QTE summarize the effects of a treatment for the entire population. They are usually of most interest in policy evaluations because the results…

This paper is the first to use quantile regression to analyze the impact of experience and size of funds of hedge funds (FHFs) on performance. In comparison to OLS regression, quantile regression provides a more detailed picture of the influence of size and experience on FHF return behaviour. Hence, it allows us to study the relevance of these factors for various return and risk…

This paper discusses the estimation of binary choice panel data models. We begin with different versions of the static random effects model when the explanatory variables are strictly exogenous. Depending on the autocorrelation structure of the errors, different
estimators are available and we detail their attractiveness in each situation by trading-off their efficiency and…

In impoverished societies a shock to the household's resources often results in a decision to reduce the contemporaneous investment on children's education. Although such shocks may be transitory in nature they could lead to permanent long run effects in terms of reduced human capital for future generations thus further enhancing a state of deprivation. This paper models…

This paper compares the inverse-probability-of-selection-weighting estimation principle with the matching principle and derives conditions for weighting and matching to identify the same and the true distribution, respectively. This comparison improves the understanding of the relation of these estimation principles and allows constructing new estimators.

We investigate the allocation of unemployed individuals to different subprograms within Swiss active labour market policy by the caseworkers at local employment offices in Switzerland in 1998. We are particularly interested in whether the caseworkers allocate the unemployed to services in ways that will maximize the program-induced changes in their employment probabilities. Our…