infonet-economy

The purpose of this paper is to explore the role of changes in the sectoral structure of world demand for the welfare implications of trade and international specialization. A two-countries two-goods model with external economies of scale is presented. Demand develops according to non-linear Engel-curves with phases of expansion and saturation. The economies of scale are exploited by...

This paper seeks to explain differential participation in social movements. It does so by attempting to bridge structural-level and individual-level explanations. We test a number of hypotheses drawn from the social networks and the rationalist perspectives on individual engagement by means of survey data on members of a major organization of the Swiss solidarity movement. Both...

Lorenz curves and second-order dominance criteria are known to be sensitive to data contamination in the right tail of the distribution. We propose two ways of dealing with the problem: (1) Estimate Lorenz curves using parametric models for income distributions, and (2) Combine empirical estimation with a parametric (robust) estimation of the upper tail of the distribution using the...

By starting from a natural class of robust estimators for generalized linear models based on the notion of quasi-likelihood, we define robust deviances that can be used for stepwise model selection as in the classical framework. We derive the asymptotic distribution of tests based on robust deviances, and we investigate the stability of their asymptotic level under contamination. The...

Distributional dominance criteria are commonly applied to draw welfare inferences about comparisons, but conclusions drawn from empirical implementations of dominance criteria may be inßuenced by data contamination. We examine a non-parametric approach to reÞning Lorenz-type comparisons and apply the technique to two important examples from the LIS data-base.

Not available in German. After unification of the East and West German economies in July 1990 the public sector devoted substantial resources to train the labour force of the former centrally planned East German economy. In this paper we describe the basic trends of the rules and regulations governing these efforts. We supplement this description with empirical stylized facts....

We examine whether publicly-traded Czech firms that received foreign direct investment (FDI) before the end of 1995 had higher levels of total factor productivity during 1995-8. Preliminary data analysis reveals that, as restructuring occurred, many Czech firms left the sample during 1995-8 and that the recipients of FDI tended to be larger firms. We show that failing to tackle the...