This study investigates the relationship between consumer search costs, inflation, and firm markups in retail trade by employing actual measures of consumer search cost gathered by way of an online consumer survey. Consistent with theory, results indicate that markups can be higher if consumer search costs are higher. Results from panel data also show that increases in inflation lead to increas...

This paper examines how availability of microfinance influences households’ borrowing from informal sources in village economies. It uses a unique household level panel data set, which spans more than two decades (1987–2008), from rural Bangladesh. We find that households’ access to microfinance reduces the incidence of borrowing from informal sources, but not the amount of borrowing. We find t...

Adolescents’ school-based friendship networks tend to be segregated along ethnic lines. But few studies have examined whether variation in network boundaries affects the degree of ethnic friendship segregation. We use rational-choice theory to argue that ethnic homophily is more pronounced for friendships between classrooms than for those within classrooms. We empirically test this hypothesis u...

How does IT outsourcing affect firm performance? What is the role of internal IT experience in IT outsourcing? Prior research has provided different answers for these two questions. This study attempts to address the inconsistencies in the literature. We distinguish between knowledge intensive IT outsourcing (KITO) and infrastructural IT outsourcing (IITO) and suggest that these two types of IT...

This article will support on the econometrics of panel data to analyse the influence of corporate social responsibility (CSR) on the financial performance measured by several indicators. From a sample of 20 firms listed on the stock exchange of Casablanca between 2007 and 2010. Our research found a negative and significant impact of the CSR on financial performance. The negative influence is im...

Personnel economics tends be based on single-firm case studies. Here we examine the personnel practices of 4,792 firms, typically over a period of 20 years, using detailed matched employer-employee panel data from Portugal. In the spirit of Baker et al. (1994a,b), we consider different dimensions of personnel management within each firm: the size of worker turnover, the role of job levels and h...

The quality of manufactured products made in China has improved tremendously in the past several decades. In this paper, we argue that crises beget opportunities for quality upgrade. We first develop a theoretical framework to show that a crisis, if used wisely, could present good opportunities for entrepreneurs and local governments to form collective action to improve product quality. Next, w...

We estimate the effect of employer offers of retiree health benefits (RHBs) on the timing of retirement using a sample of Health and Retirement Study (HRS) men observed over a period of up to 12 years. We hypothesize that the effect of RHBs differs for workers of different ages—a hypothesis we can test now that the main HRS cohort has aged sufficiently. We apply three wellknown panel data estim...

India’s National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (NREGS) has been hailed as one of the country’s most creative social initiatives. Since the program was begun only recently (in 2004-05) there is a need to assess its impact on households not just in one year but over time. To the best of our knowledge there are no studies of the latter kind. Using a unique panel data set for 2007-08 and 2009-1...

Using unique and unpublished panel data from selected US cities, the paper investigates the consequences of ignoring unobserved heterogeneity in the unit of observationwhenestimating the economicmodel of crime. Results con® rmthat neglecting to control for unobserved heterogeneity overstates the ability of sanctions to deter criminal activity. Further, thisupwardbias is found tovary signi® cant...